72- 15,293

SHARP, Nicholas Andrew, 1944- SHAKESPEARE'S BAROQUE COMEDY: THE WINTER'S TALE.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1971 Language and Literature, modern

University Microfilms, A XERQ\Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan

THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED SHAKESPEARE'S BAROQUE CŒEDY: THE V/INTER'S TALE

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Nicholas Andrew Sharp, B,A., M,A,

*****

The Ohio State University 1971

Approved by

Id^iser Department of English PLEASE NOTE:

Some pages have indistinct print. Filmed as received.

University Microfilms, A Xerox Education Company Acknowledgraent

I am extremely grateful to my adviser, Professor Rolf Soellner, for his advice, suggestions, and constant encouragement.

ii VITA

January 24, 1944 . . . Born— Kansas City, Missouri

1966 ...... B.A., The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas

1966-1970...... NDEA Fellow, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1968-1969, 1971-1972 . Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1968 ...... M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENT...... ii

VITA ...... •...... iii

INTRODUCTION: BAROQUE AS AN HISTORICAL CONCEPT .... 1

Chapter

I. THE JACOBEAN SETTING AND THE BAROQUE AESTHETIC 16

II. THE THEME OF SKEPTICAL FIDEISM...... 45

III. THE STRUCTURE...... 81

IV. THE CHARACTERIZATION...... 114

CONCLUSION ...... 150

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED ...... 154

iv INTRODUCTION

BAROQUE AS AN HISTORICAL CONCEPT

In Endeavors of Art (Madison: Wisconsin U. Press, 1954) Mad­ eleine Doran has argued that Shakespearean drama manifests an es­ sentially Renaissance aesthetic form. Basing her ideas upon one of the five principles for distinguishing Renaissance from Baroque set forth by the art historian Friedrich Woelfflin, she believes that

Shakespeare's major plays reveal the “multiple unity*’ or "unity • • • achieved by a harmony of free parts" which is characteristic of the

Renaissance spirit and perception.^ Focused primarily upon Shake­ speare's romantic comedies and high tragedies, her argument reveals a remarkable scholarly grasp of the context of Elizabethan dramatic theory and practice, and so far as she carries it, her thinking is extraordinarily enlightening.

Professor Doran, however, has little to say about Shakespeare's late plays, and with good reason; for the late plays are just as certainly Baroque as the earlier ones are Renaissance. The formal unity revealed by Cymbeline, The Tempest, and especially The Winter's

Tale is distinctly the "unified unity" or "union of parts in a single theme . . . by the subordination, to one unconditioned dominant, of

Heinrich Woelfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger %New York: Henry Holt, 1932), p. 15. all other elenents" which Woelfflin defines as fundamental to the 2 Baroque style and perception. This fact, though it is widely recog­ nized among students of Baroque literature and has been suggested by a few Shakespeareans, has exerted almost no influence upon critical thinking about the late plays.^ It is, however, a fact of potentially crucial value in breaking from the pattern of mythico-theological criticism which, as Hallett Smith pointed out several years ago, has become so tiresomely dominant in approaches to the romances.

More importantly, perhaps, it is a fact which should be of central importance in understanding how and why Shakespeare's style under­ went such remarkable change after the writing of Pericles in 1609.

In this study, then, I intend both to emulate Doran and to contradict her. Like her, I intend to rely rather heavily upon Woelf- flin's theories; Woelfflin's idea that aesthetic form reveals how an artist thinks, while substance or intellectual content reveals what he is thinking, though it posits an impossibly neat distinction between form and content, has been proved useful for literary crit­ icism by Doran's own highly informative study.^ Like her I intend

Woelfflin, Principles, p. 15.

See Samuel Leslie Bethel1, The Winter's Tale: A Study (London: Staples, 1947), pp. 107-17; Carl Joachim Friedrich, The Age of the Baroque 1610-1660, The Rise of M odem Europe Series, ed. William L, Langer (New York: Harper & Row, 1952), p. 48; Frank J. Wamke, "Baroque Poetry and the Experience of Contradiction," Colloquia Ger- manica, 1 (1967), 48.

^Hallett Smith, "Shakespeare's Last Plays: Facts and Problems," SRO, 3 (1967), 9-16. A most useful over view of criticism on the romances.

^For the distinction between formal and iconographie criticism see Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (Oxford: Oxford Ü. Press, 193), 3

to focus particularly upon the nature of formal unity in the drama; unity of form is a universal quality of all good drama, and, thus,

it is familiar and easy to deal with. In slight contradiction to

Doran*s (and Woelfflin*a) methodology, however, I will not try to

avoid all dealings with thematic content; completely to divorce form

from content is an impossible ideal anyway, as Woelfflin*s attempts

to do so have shown.^ Moreover, to avoid dealing with the intellec­

tual substance of a work forces one also to ignore the important

question of how form relates to content, a major issue in understanding

any play. More importantly, however, I will differ with a part, at

least, of Doran*s conclusion that Shakespearean dramatic form is

essentially Renaissance. The Winter*s Tale and, by extension, the other Romances as well, are works in a basically Baroque style, and

their Baroque quality can be seen upon the same spectrum as Doran used in measuring the Renaissance quality of Shakespeare's earlier

plays.

I am not, of course, attempting to deal with the whole question

of periodization in Shakespeare's style. My focus is on the last plays, the romances. Whether the high tragedies are Baroque or the

problem plays Mannerist are questions outside the scope of my interest.

That Shakespeare's earlier works are Renaissance, I believe, is almost universally admitted. In this study I am primarily concerned with

arguing that The Winter's Tale and the other late plays, especially when contrasted to the earlier ones, are demonstrably Baroque.

An unimpeachable definition of Baroque, however, is a very

^See, e.g.. Principles, pp. 159-63. 4 difficult item to produce at the present time because the term has gone through so many shifts and mutations since Woelfflin first made it a descriptive rather than a pejorative word. The rigorously formal and stylistic definition which Woelfflin used has become almost im­ possible to accept per se, even in his particular field of art his­ tory. And what few attempts have been made at transferring, all of

Woelfflin*8 categories directly into literary studies have proved that major problems exist in even the most scrupulous applications 7 of his entire theory. Of course, Woelfflin*s thinking has not been entirely rejected; he remains the greatest of the theorists. But many alternatives and modifications have been proposed to strengthen the weaknesses in his ideas. In fact, theories and explanations of the

Baroque have so proliferated, and in so many different directions, that difficulties in using the term almost inevitably develop when one must choose to use a single approach from the many intelligent proposals which have been made.

The most significant change in Woelfflin's basic pattern has come in the attitudes toward Mannerism. Once widely held to be a minor transitional style aspiring to be both Renaissance and Baroque but failing at both. Mannerism is now usually recognized as a major style of its own. Works which Woelfflin could unhesitatingly identify as Baroque are viewed as thoroughly Mannerist by many modern critics.

The implications for W6elfflin*s theory are quite significant. One

See, e.g.; Darnell Higgins Roaten and Federico Sanchez y Es- crabano, Woelff1in*s Principles in Spanish Drama 1500-1700 (New York: Hispanic Institute, 1952). 5 very important scholar, Ernst Robert Curtins, for instance, has ar­ gued that Mannerism is a preferable term to Baroque in virtually all literary contexts, and a disciple of Curtius has interpreted the

Baroque period as merely an historical era dominated by a Mannerist O style. Such ideas are extreme, of course, but they are the products of serious and important thinkers. They indicate the kind of problem which now exists in the use of the term Baroque.

Almost always, however, modern thinking about the Baroque begins with Woelfflin. Certainly in this study at least one of Woelfflin*s stylistic categories. Renaissance multiple unity and Baroque unified unity, is crucial to the definition of the term. "Baroque," however, has come to mean so much more than it meant to Woelfflin that, even despite some aestheticians* urgings to the contrary, some explanation and definition of the term is a useful and important requirement for 9 those who would use it. In modern thinking about the Baroque, three basic types of definition prevail.The three are interlocking; they

O Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), pp. 273-301; Blake Lee Spahr, "Baroque and Mannerism: Epoch and Style," Colloquia Germanica, 1 (1967), 78-100. 9 Clifford Amyx in "Style and Method," Colloquia Germanica, 1 (1967), 26-37, suggests that Baroque needs no further defining.

limit myself to discussing "modem thinking," meaning studies published since World War II, because it seems useless to re-examine trends already well chronicled in two works on the Baroque. Rene Wellek, "The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship," JAAC, 5. (1946), 97-103, Giuliano Pelligrini’s "Shakespeare e gli studi sul barocco inglese," Barocco Inglese, Biblioteca di Cultura Contemporanea, 41 (Messina: G. D ’Anna, 1953), pp. 33-49, provides a usefula and thorough account of the idea of the Baroque in relation to Shake­ speare. 6 sometimes appear all together in a single definition. They remain distinct, however, and most literary critics reflect one category or another. These three approaches to the Baroque in literature are the formal, the thematic, and the historical.

The formalists define Baroque in terras of stylistic traits.

Like Woelfflin they think of Baroque as a distinct style, and they study the Baroque in terms of how a playwright, poet, or prose writer expresses his ideas rather than what ideas he records. For the great analyst of prose, Morris Croll, Baroque is above all a question of rhetoric; he identifies it with the adoption of certain "Senecan" habits of syntax and diction.For a critic of Baroque poetry such as Frank Wamke, Baroque means "a cluster of related styles" including the metaphysical, precieux. High Baroque, and others, all of which can be identified by qualities like the metaphysical conceit, Gon- 12 gorism, and so on. Wylie Sypher approaches art and literature from a generally formalist position, and so do Lowry Nelson, Jr., Odette de Mourgues, and Alexandre Cioranescu.^^ The formalists' primary

Morris W. Croll, "The Baroque Style in Prose," ed. John M. Wallace, in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. Max Patrick et al. (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1966), pp. 207-33.

^^rank J. Wamke, European Metaphysical Poetry (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1961), p. 3. 13 Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style (Garden City: Doiibleday, 1955); Lowry Nelson, Jr., Baroque Lyric Poetry (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1961); Odette de Mourgues, Metaphysical, Baroque, and Precieux Poetry (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1953); Alexandre Cior- anescu, "Baroque et Action Dramatique: Le Dehors et le Dedans," Actes des Journées International d'étude du Baroque, 2 (1967), 99-107. concern with Baroque, then, becomes the question of identifying a particular set of traits which apply to the Baroque and only to the Baroque, and this is a major task confronted in most of their studies.

One immediate problem of this approach is the confusion which develops between Baroque and Mannerism. Since the two are usually thought of as distinct styles in modern criticism, they should be carefully separated. In practice, however, they have often been con­ fused. Is Donne Baroque or Mannerist? There are arguments for both positions; Lowry Nelson says Baroque, and Wylie Sypher says Mannerist.

Unquestionably, much of the confusion results from the old failure to concede Mannerism a place as a real style at all; some definitions define Baroque at least partly on the basis of works which other critics call Mannerist. Woelfflin is a good example. But so long as Baroque is defined in such purely stylistic terms, such confusion is likely to continue.

A larger problem, however, is that stylistic definition is often impossibly paradoxical. Stylistic definitions stated in terms general enough to apply to all the works usually recognized as Baroque are also general enough to apply to works which no one wishes to call Baroque. Statius and St. Bernard may well seem to fit the def­ inition as well as Milton and Browne. Some few critics have been 14 willing to follow their logic to such conclusions. Most demur.

Some, like Frank Wamke, add a chronological modifier to their formal

^^See Gisela Luther, Barocker Expressionismus?, Stanford Studies in Germanics and Slavics, 6 (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1969). 8 definitions; others, like Lowry Nelson, Jr., ignore works from out­ side a distinct historical setting. Nearly all those who think of the Baroque as a style, however, end up in the same inconsistent position. Either stylistic considerations demand that they ignore the historical limits on the Baroque, or historical considerations demand that they ignore the consequences of their stylistic definition.

The thematic critics need not face such a problem. For them the Baroque is above all a set of particular themes, motifs, and concepts which are uniquely confined to a distinct historical period centering in the first half of the seventeenth century. For Mario

Praz,a conjunction of concerns with eroticism and surprise such as Crashaw displays in the sensual paradoxes of his poems on St. 15 Theresa defines the Baroque. For Helmut Hatzfeld six categories of intellectual concern such as ^.'Jesuitism and Jansenism," which he summarizes in the contrast between Corneille’s "Jesuit" belief in the will and Racines "Jansenist" concern for the weakness of the will when unaided by grace, are the hallmarks of the the Baroque in France.A major anthology of French Baroque poetry presents the Baroque lyric entirely within a structure of major themes such as the illusory nature of reality.And Raymond Lebegue, Rocco Mon-

^^Mario Praz, "The Flaming Heart: Richard Crashaw and the Bar­ oque," in The Flaming Heart (Garden City: Doubleday, 1958), pp. 204- 205. l6 Helmut A. Hatzfeld, Literature through Art: A New Approach to French Literature (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1952T.

^^Jean Paul Rousset, ed., Anthologie de la Poésie Baroque Fran­ çaise, Bibliothèque de Cluny, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1961). tano, M. M. Mahood and others approach the Baroque with an essentially 18 thematic orientation.

These critics, however, must face their own problem; the them­

atic concerns which they isolate are far from being either peculiar

to Baroque artists or universally present in Baroque works. Many

individual works which are clearly Baroque, perhaps even the work

of a recognized Baroque master, have no overt connection with any

of the thematic categories which they isolate. Thus, Corneille's

early L'tllusion comique, a piece generally recognized as Baroque, 19 fits none of the themes isolated by Hatzfeld. The Baroque lyrics

of Vaughan, while they may be surprising, seldom conjoin amazement

with eroticism as Praz says Baroque poetry does. In other words,

to arrive at a set of thematic generalizations adequate to describe

all, or even most. Baroque literature, they must devise such unin-

formatively universal classifications as "mysticism" or "the brevity

of life." This, indeed, is a serious problem.

A third approach is unabashedly historical. It defines and

uses "Baroque" as a period term of the same type as "Renaissance"

or "Medieval." Carl J. Friedrich is the best and best-known historian

to theorize upon the Baroque from this point of view, though he owes

Raymond Lebegue, "Le merveilleux dans le théâtre français a 1’époque baroque," Revue d*Histoire du théâtre, 15 (1963),*7-12; Rocco Montano, "Metaphysical and Verbal Arguzia and the Essence of t'-.e the Baroque," Colloquia Germanica,. 1 (1967), 49-65; Molly Maureen Mahood, Poetry and Humanism (London: Cape, 1950). 19 See Imbrie Buffum, Studies in the Baroque from Montaigne to Rotrou, Yale Romanic Studies, 2nd Series, no. 4 (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1957), pp. 163-72. 10 much of his inspiration to the far more broadly speculative concept of the Baroque period advanced by Oswald Spengler in The Decline 20 of the West» Spengler applied "Baroque" to the whole of the "late pre-civilization" epoch in Western culture, approximately 1500 to 1800.

Friedrich restricts it to the period from 1610 to 1660, Like Spengler, however, he sees a Baroque pattern in politics, summarized by the

Thirty Years War, a Baroque pattern in philosophy, typified by Hobbes, and, of course, a Baroque pattern in art and letters. Obviously, all of these are merely particular manifestations of a general his­ torical pattern, a European spirit of the times generally reducible to a thrust for pure, naked power, whether it be an artist’s power 21 over an audience or a ruler’s power over his subjects.

Patently, this time spirit approach has some weaknesses, and some very large ones at that. To be really useful it requires a grasp upon the whole of seventeenth century history and, more than simply a grasp, a reasonably coherent interpretation. Moreover, the whole idea of an epochal spirit of the times seems questionable to many scholars, particularly when such a time spirit is posited as a uni­ fying and explaining agent for a period so filled with variety and contradiction as the seventeenth century in Europe.

Nevertheless, of the three approaches to the Baroque, this historical method seems to be the most workable, and most of the

20 Friedrich, Age of the Baroque; Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols. (New York; Knopf, 1926-9). 21 See also Carl Joachim Friedrich and Charles Blitzer, The Age of Power (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1965). 11

formalist and thematic critics seem to lend it their support* Even

for Woelfflin the main value of formalism was its ability to provide

a theoretical frame within which to mount a methodology for under­

standing how the Renaissance and the Baroque artist perceived; the

underlying assumption was that some major shift in thought occurred

from one era to another, and, of course, such epochal alterations

are the very stuff from which Zeitgeists are made. Croll believed

that seventeenth century prose style revealed a "radical" shift in 22 world-view, i.e., the synthesis of a new time spirit. Hatzfeld

and the other thematic critics also support the historical approach,

though a bit more openly than the formalists. If Jesuitism and Jan­

senism are categories by which to identify and define the Baroque,

.'i r then Baroque art is clearly the art of a distinct period and, in

truth, it is merely a particular manifestation of much wider histor­

ical phenomena. In either case, whether Baroque be taken to mean

the form of art produced by the "seventeenth century perception" or

the themes of art created by the "seventeenth century mentality/' one deals with art on essentially historical grounds. Art is seen as the product of a a particular frame of mind, and that frame of mind is not limited to an individual but is common to the age. Clearly, when one begins to deal with mentality on such a sweeping scale, he is, like it or not, talking about the spirit of the age, a time spirit which is as certain to manifest itself in philosophy and pol­

itics as in art. Some critics may, of course, deem it indiscreet

to call this general spirit Baroque, but no other term is so logical

^^Croll, "Baroque Style," p. 207, 12 or so accurate. Basically, the formalist and thematic critics both agree with Friedrich and Spengler} there is some sort of Baroque spirit in the seventeenth century, and participation in this spirit is the final reason for calling anything Baroque.

Some critics cavil at the idea of referring to the whole era as Baroque, however. They prefer to think of Baroque as a particular category of the seventeenth century spirit, manifested only in art and literature. The historians, however, have more logic on their side when they argue that once one begins to talk of a seventeenth century world-view, reason demands that particular manifestations . in art or an art form be viewed not as separate genres but as sub-types of the larger world-vision. Baroque painting, in other words, is not only a particular type of painting but is also a particular type of

Baroque. There are also other types of Baroque in politics, liter­ ature, and anywhere else that the spirit of the age manifests itself.

"Baroque," then, except for those few critics willing to think of the term as a perennial and recurrent stylistic type, means "par­ ticipating in the main current of seventeenth century history," just as "Renaissance" has come to have an analogous meaning for an earlier period. A Baroque poem, painting, or play;is one which deals with a theme important to seventeenth century thinkers and which expresses that theme in a form common among seventeenth century artists. In its theme it reveals a typically and uniquely seventeenth century interest in some idea, and in its form it shows a peculiarly and particularly seventeenth century pattern of perceiving. There is, of course, some problem in identifying just what traits are charac­ 13

teristically seventeenth century, but every study yet made of seven­

teenth century art and history has contributed something to our know­

ledge. Some few things, at least, have emerged as major items. A concern with unified unity in form is one; an interest in the grand and the awesome is another. Each study of a typically seventeenth century phenomenon, whether it be a dispersed study of, say, the metaphysical conceit in a number of writers or a concentrated exam­

ination of a single work such as d'Aubigne's Les Tragiques, adds

to the list. To be sure, it will be a long time before anyone com­ piles a definitive catalogue of uniquely seventeenth century traits.

A partial list, however, exists already, and each new study adds something to the comprehension of the Baroque.

In this study, then, Baroque has this general historical meaning.

In arguing that The Winter's Tale is Baroque, however, I am not simply arguing a tautology or a truism. ’’Baroque" and "seventeenth century" are not synonyms, and a work produced in 1610 or 1611 is no more necessarily Baroque than a work produced in 1540 is neces­ sarily Renaissance. Fulke Greville’s lyrics, for instance, though written during the high period of the Renaissance in England, are not in the Renaissance mode; their anti-Petrarchan quality and their acerbic wit is more typical of a later style. Sackville's "Induction" to the Mirror for Magistrates is more nearly Medieval with its dream and vision than it is Renaissance. Skelton can hardly be categorized at all. And Ralegh's History of the World is Renaissance, not Baroque.

Neither is it the same to call an English work Baroque as it is to call it Jacobean. Elizabethan and Renaissance do not mean the u same things; neither do Jacobean and Baroque* Bacon is a Baroque figure both in his prose style and in his philosophic concern for the advancement of all science and reason* His radical empiricism, however, is a particularly Jacobean creation, distinct from the more widely European rationalism of a man like Herbert of Cherbury*

By viewing The Winter's Tale as Baroque, then, I am attempting to say that while it is clearly a Jacobean play it is also more than just Jacobean. It shares in a wide trend which includes not only much of the major Jacobean and Caroline drama but also much of the

European drama of such figures as Calderon and Corneille. The play expresses a theme of wide importance to seventeenth century thinkers and artists, both English and Continental, and it deals with that theme in a way which was an ordinary approach in the seventeenth century* In essence, I am saying that to treat the play as simply

Jacobean is to limit its context to the point of distorting our understanding of it, just as some inevitable distortion appears when the earlier plays are viewed entirely without reference to

Continental drama, criticism, and philosophy* It is possible, after all, to interpret a play like Richard III entirely within the con­ text of the English dramatic tradition. To ignore the importance of

French and Italian Senecanlsm, of Machiavelli and Gentillet, and of Contintal theories on the moral purpose of tragedy and history, however, is to ignore much that enlightens our understanding of the work* The same is true of The Winter's Tale. '

In particular, then, this study will begin with an historical survey of the Jacobean world within which The Winter's Tale was written 15; and of the relationship between Jacobean and Baroque. The next chapter will discuss the theme of the play and its historical con-. :. text. The next two chapters will take up two elements of the play's form, structure and characterization, in order to emphasize the importance of Baroque unified unity as a determining principle in the work. Then, in my conclusion I will draw the whole argument together once again.

Central to my purpose will be three main ideas. First, I will constantly recur to the idea that the Baroque, like any other his­ torical period, is not only a departure from the era preceding it but is also a continuation and modification of the Renaissance.

Second, I will be much concerned with the idea of skeptical fideism, the dominant theme of The Winter's'Tale and an important element in Baroque thinking at many levels. And third, I will stress the idea, central to my understanding of Baroque style, of unified unity and its implicit imperative that the artist must above all make his work the most perfectly consistent vehicle possible for the expression of a central theme, no matter what tricks and techniques he must resort to in the process. I will, then; be giving approxi­ mately equal weight.to historical, thematic, and formal elements, all of which are necessary to understand how and why the play is

Baroque. By this demonstration of what makes The Winter's Tale

Baroque, I believe that I will be making the play more comprehensible and valuable not only as an item in the history of drama but as an aesthetic entity, beautiful and meaningful in its own right. CHAPTER I

THE JACOBEAN SETTING AND THE BAROQUE AESTHETIC

The Winter's Tale is a distinctively Jacobean play. Shakespeare

■wrote it in the middle third of James I ’s twenty-two year reign,

sometime late in 1610 or early in 1611.^ He created it in the dom­

inant Jacobean form, tragicomedy, and utilized an obviously Jaco­

bean style of blank verse, low in capping couplets and high in

run-on lines. He wrote it to play before a a distinctly Jacobean

audience, one that disdained Marlowe while applauding Fletcher

and that avoided the historical pageantry of chronicle plays while

admiring the impressive spectacle of Stuart masques. The play achieved

remarkable success with the court, at least, of a king who had

thoroughly transmuted, after nearly eight years on the throne,

the social patterns of Elizabethan court life into patterns uniquely 2 his own.

Like many another generation of theater audiences the Jacobeans were anxious to condemn the previous era in order to laud their own;

they made and saw distinctions which seemed, perhaps, much greater

An allusion to Jonson's Masque of Oberon (IV.iv.345-6) in­ dicates that the play was still incomplete on January 1, 1611, the date the masque was performed. Simon Forman's diary records a performance at the Globe, on May 15, 1611.

^ary Susan Steele in Plays and Masques at Court (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1926), records more performances of WT than of any other play except Fletcher's Cupid's Revenge. Each had five court performances. 17

than they were. There was, though, a real difference between the

Jacobean world of 1611 and the the Elizabethan world of a decade

earlier. For an artist as consistently responsive to the life of the world around him as was Shakespeare, such differences were very Im­

portant; they had a telling effect upon his mind and art. One logical

place to begin a study of so obviously au courant a play as The

Winter's Tale, then, is with the Jacobean world in which Shakespeare wrote his last plays. In discovering what it was like to be in a

London which had ceased to be Elizabethan and become Jacobean, what

it meant to write for a theater and a taste which had altered from

Tudor patterns to Stuart, we can find some remarkable hints about

how the late plays functioned in their original setting. By looking

carefully at the most important influence on Shakespeare, the theater which provided him with wealth and fame, and at the more general

context of society, the arts, letters, politics, and religion, it

is possible to discern some general directions of change influencing 'i virtually all levels of English life. And by looking with particular

il care at the change in aesthetic as the predominantly Renaissance

taste of the Elizabethans gave way to the new Baroque taste ol^ the

Stuarts, it is possible to see a broad pattern of change which in­

fluenced, and was influenced by, the late plays of Shakespeare,

especially The Winter's Tale.

From a very wide historical stance one can see that the ac­

cession of James to the throne of England is merely an overt signal of England's entry into the strife and trouble which plagued all 18

Europe in the seventeenth century. No matter who took the throne

when Elizabeth died, trouble lay ahead for England and for the

rest of Europe as well. The Stuarts, to be sure, did little to al­

lay the problems, much to intensify them, but as even the great.

Whig historian Gardiner admits, James and Charles faced few troubles

which were not already sources of conflict when Elizabeth dled.^

H. R. Trevor-Roper’s major interpretation of the political,

social, and economic changes of the Jacobean era views them as

England’s particular form of entryinto a European "general crisis

of the seventeenth century." According to his theory, the middle

of the century saw the whole question of the state’s relationship

to society undergoing radical, usually violent, restructuring. The

religious, constitutional, and military struggles of the Revolution

in England were but part of a wider struggle including the Frondes

in France, the Catalonian, Portugese, and Andalusian revolts in

Spain, the dissolution of the Empire in Germany, and the other

internal, basically political conflicts which plagued nearly all

of Europe in the 1640’s, 50’s, and 60’s. Such mammoth change re­

sulted from a long period of social shifts and the Continent-^ide

substitution of one world-view for another. The events in Jacobean

England were merely local, particular manifestations of an emerging

European issue of' epoch-making proportions.

3 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James ^ ^o the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603-1642 (London; Longmans Green, 1883-4), I, 42-3, 4 See Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1967) and Trevor Henry Aston, ed.. Crisis in Europe 1560-1660 (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1965). 19

Carl J. Friedrich takes a similar position. In his view thé

political, social, and intellectual patterns in Jacobean England

are but some of England!s particular manifestations of the emergent

Baroque spirit which is a defining characteristic of seventeenth

century Europe. The separation of class from class within the state,

the struggle between the Crown and the Commons, and the artistic movement toward sensationalism reveal, f?rom his viewpoint, England's

participation in the dominant concern of all seventeenth century

culture and society, the Baroque drive for unadorned and unadulter­

ated power. In a post-Machiavellian world, might and right no longer

seemed synonymous. To the Baroque spirit, being right was not only not enough, it was secondary; primary was the achievement of power

to enforce one's will; secondary was the concern to exert one's will

in the right direction. Power, thus, became an end in itself, and

the most eloquent expression of the Baroque spirit was Hobbes'

Leviathan, though mercantilism, the Society of Jesus, Gustavus

Adolphus, and the Thirty Years War were nearly as pure in their

own ways. In all its protean forms, the drive for power became;the

link unifying Englishman, Frenchman, German, Italian, Spaniard^

artist, philosopher, statesman, poet, and theologian in a single

Odyssean quest. This quest for power defines Baroque, and, for 5 Friedrich, Baroque defines the period from 1610 to 1660.

Both of these views, and most other general histories of the

seventeenth century in Europe and in England, stress that Jacobean

^Friedrich, Age of the Baroque. 20

England was moving toward something else; they openly view the Jac­ obean era as the start of something which reached fulfillment only in the Commonwealth. They are right to do so, but to focus on the particular years of 1610 and 1611, it is necessary to stress not only where the Jacobeans were going but also where they were coming from. Though they had left the Elizabethan world behind, the Jaco­ beans had left it only recently, and in 1611 it was still very close in many, many ways. The essence of the distinction between

Elizabethan and Jacobean, in fact, lies less in sharp contrasts and clear cut differences than in modifications in pre-existing patterns and shifts in pre-established directions. The world did not stop when Elizabeth died and start over again when James assumed the throne. It did, however, begin to change, and by the time James had completed the first third of his reign, as he nearly had when

The Winter's Tale was in its genesis, some of the changes had become quite marked.

The Winter's Tale itself is a model of how Elizabethan ele­ ments continued strong in Jacobean creations. It is a melange of techniques, devices, and patterns which Shakespeare had perfected during the Elizabethan years. The play's source is Greene's Pandosto, a very thoroughly Elizabethan prose romance published in 1592.

The plot device of the lost child dates, for Shakespeare, back to The Comedy of Errors. The use of songs and of the masque goes back to Love's Labour's Lost. And most of the characters have analogues, if not sources, in Shakespeare's earlier works; Autolycus clearly relates to Feste and Parolles among others, and Hermione grows from 21

Portia. The Winter's Tale, however, differs sharply from many Eliz­

abethan norms. The tragicomic form, perhaps the major type of English

drama by the time of Charles I, is not common among Elizabethan

plays.^ An allegorical figure like Time is almost totally unprec­

edented in earlier works by Shakespeare, and the neatly fractured

two-part structure is equally so. The surprise ending, attained

only by withholding crucial information from the audience, and

the coup de theatre of the last scene, are typical of Jacobean

and Caroline dramaturgy, but they are unparalleled in Shakespeare's

work before Pericles. In general, it seems fair to say that The

Winter's Tale is a small but clear example of how the Jacobean

world retained much that was Elizabethan while introducing changes

which rendered things distinctly new and Jacobean.

The alteration in Shakespeare's style is hardly unique; it

is part of a whole series of changes beginning to take place as

English drama evolved from Elizabethan to Jacobean. The changes

in Shakespeare are, in fact, only one small manifestation of the

shifting direction of the theater as it grew from the predominantly

Renaissance drama of the sixteenth century into the Baroque style

of the seventeenth.

Nothing was more critical in determining the new directions which the drama was to take than the shift in dominance from the

See Frank Humphrey Ristine, English Tragicomedy (New York: Columbia Ü.Press, 1910),,^ d Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. 39 (Urbana: Illinois Ü, Press, 1955). 22 7 public theater to the private playhouse. When James I took the throne in 1603, the public playhouses were clearly the dominant force in the life of English drama. There were boy companies performing at two private theaters, Paul's and Blackfrlars, and they seemed to pose a real threat to the adult companies during the period of the "War of the Theaters." But the "little eyases" were in reality nothing more than a rather sensational aberration from the norm; they disappeared from the scene almost entirely when James suppressed 8 them in 1608. The main tradition of English drama was being car­ ried on by the public playhouses located outside the city on Bank- side to the south or near Cripplegate to the north. The Globe, the

Rose, the Fortune, and the other public playhouses were large buildings with seating capacities in the thousands. Inexpensive to attend, open to the elements, and lighted by the sun, the wide thrust stages of the public theaters provided the environment within which English drama grew from a conglomerate of late-medieval moralities, Tudor interludes, pseudo-Senecan tragedies, and assorted other elements into a sophisticated art-form and a highly professionalized business.

Entirely the creation of the Elizabethan period, these playhouses exerted a tremendous influence upon the life of the drama evolving within them; they impressed a mark upon English theater life which continued to be highly visible long after the last public playhouse

hr, 1 See Gerald Eades Bentley, "Shakespeare and the Blackfrlars Theatre," ShS. 1 (1948), 38-50. g See Harold Newcomb Hillebrand, The Child Actors, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. 11, Nos. 1 & 2 (Urbana: Illinois U. Press, 1926). 23 had been torn down. Of course, the drama did not immediately cast off all debts to its first real homes when, after the period between

1608 and 1610, its major trends came more and more to be associated with the small, expensive to attend, enclosed, artificially lighted 9 private theaters located within the city. In fact, far more was retained from the public theater tradition than was changed when the King’s Men first established themselves at Blackfrlars in 1610 and later when Queen Anne's Company took over the Phoenix in 1617.

But there were some changes, and the importance of those alterations can be best understood by remembering that they were made by the two most prestigious, well-patronized, and influential theatrical companies of the period. The companies' responses to the changed theatrical environment accounted for a large measure of the distinction between Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

The most obvious changes grew from the new physical surroundings.

With the smaller, closer audience and altered acoustics of the roofed private theaters, throat-tearing and bombast had to be controlled quite carefully, but there was the compensation that fairly subtle s.. shades of intonation and vocal expression could be exploited. With the substitution of candles for natural sunlight, some new stage effects became possible, some old ones unworkable. The smaller stage dictated some new limitations. And the possibilities for using music and machinery obviously changed. The "solemn and strange music" and "soft music" called for so frequently in the Folio stage-directlons

9 See Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 3-77. 24 for The Tempest were more perceptible and effective in the close atmosphere of Blackfriars than in the wide-open Globe, and the

"quaint devices" called for by Cymbeline and The Tempest may well have had some connections with the different potentialities for machin­ ery in the private theater. A more subtle but, perhaps, more per­ vasive change lay in the general actor-audience relationship. In the private playhouse, the actor lacked the peculiar intimacy of the public stage; at Blackfriars there was not much of the sort of interplay, satirized by Beaumont and Fletcher in The Knight of the

Burning Pestle, wherein spectator could have a direct effect upon the character and even the plot of the play set before him at the public playhouse. Some of the spontaneity in the actor's relation­ ship to his audience must have died. In the private theater, though, the actor also gained a new sort of intimacy with the spectators.

In the relatively dark, closed, quiet theaters, the actors became the center of a much more fully focused attention than they could ever gain while thrust into the middle of a standing, milling aud­ ience. The actor’s control over the audience became greater because / he was more thoroughly able to dominate their attention. j

With the altered physical surroundings came a change in the nature of the audience. Instead of the socially diversified, heavily middle class audience of the public playhouses, the private theaters attracted mainly the wealthy and aristocratic playgoers able to meet the stiff admission price. There were no penny tickets and ho groundlings at Blackfriars. The court encouraged this sort of social separatism in the audience, though perhaps inadvertently, by fod- 25 taring a great deal of interest in the drama among those associated with the royal household. Under Elizabeth the acting companies had been patronized by some of England's most powerful men, the

Lord Chamberlain (Henry, then George, Carey), the Lord Admiral

(Charles Howard), and others, but the Queen had little more to do with the theater than observing the occasional court performances.

At the accession of the Stuarts, however, the royal family became directly involved with the drama. In 1603 both King James and Prince

Henry became patrons of major companies, and Anne, Elizabeth, and

Charles soon had companies of their own. The number of court per­ formances nearly trebled after James became king, and Queen Anne saw to it that the masque became a frequent, flamboyant^ and ex­ pensive piece of court display. The Queen was known even to attend performances at the theaters, so great was her own fondness for the drama, and her enthusiasm predictably extended itself to everyone interested in dealing with her or any of the royal family. Without this kind of intense interest among the wealthy and influential classes, the adult companies could hardly have maintained themselves at the private theaters. In the first place, they needed extreme political influence in order to resist the strong resentment against them expressed by the Lord Mayor and other London officials. More­ over, as profit-making organizations, they had to have a free-spending audience in order to make the large sums of money inducing them to operate in the small private theaters. After 1610 the aristocratic audience generally stayed away from the rough and often rowdy theaters on Bankside and the other suburbs, while the less than well-to-do 26 spectators avoided the expensive playhouses in the city. This bifur­ cation induced changes in the Elizabethan dramatic patterns.

The companies, of course, knew where their bread was buttered, and they directed their efforts towards pleasing this new kind of audience. The court, obviously, was a prime determinant in public taste, especially in the taste of aristocrats and courtiers, and the Jacobean court had a particular fondness for the kind of song, dance, poetry, and spectacle normally associated with the Stuart masque. The audience was understandably eager to see whatever was fashionable among the great, whatever had been presented before the King and his favorites. So playwrights and acting companies deliberately adapted more masque elements to their productions than before; songs and dances performed before the King sold tickets.

Elaborate stage machines and "quaint devices" similar to Inigo Jones's inventions for Anne's entertainments were equally fashionable.

The taste for romance, fantasy, and sensationalism also may have derived directly from the masque or indirectly from the masque's influence on the thought of audiences. With the mechanics and appren­ tices consigned to the Globe and the Red Bull, the playwrights could excise at least the lowest and coarsest forms of humor from their productions for the private theaters while indulging in greater sentimentality and pathos.

A major part of the adjustment to the new and peculiarly Jacobean kind of audiencewas a distinct shift in the repertoire.of the com-

10 The masque of "saltiers" in WT, IV.iv., for instance, is probably an adaptation of Jonson's antimasque from The Masque of Oberon. 27 11 panles. When the King's Men began performing at Blackfrlars,

they Immediately attached to themselves the almost exclusive ser­ vices of the finest playwrights In the country. Shakespeare remained

their leading author, of course, but Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher joined him. With these for their primary writers, the King's Men added a new genre to their stock of plays, the tragicomedy. By the time Charles I succeeded his father to the throne the tragicomedy 12 had become the major type of English drama. The historical pageant became mainly the property of the public playhouses, as did domestic drama, while the private theaters specialized In Fletcher's type of tragicomedy, Jonsonlan "city-comedy," and Ford's style of sensa­ tional tragedy. Any number of plays written for the King's Men, of course, came onto the boards of both Blackfrlars and the Globe, and there must have been a good deal of Interchange between public and private playhouse In all the companies. The private theaters, however, were not only far more lucrative than the older style of playhouse, they were far more Influential on those audiences most worth Influencing, and there Is no doubt that after 1610 more ^ d more of the English drama was created specifically for one klnii of theater or the other. It was the private theater, particularly

Blackfrlars, which was most Important to the serious Jacobean author.

Compare the repertoire at the Globe with that at Blackfrlars. See Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe 1599-1609 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), and Irwin Smith, Shakespeare's Blackfrlars Play« house (New York: New York Ü, Press, 1964). 12 See Ristine, English Tragicomedy, and Herrick, Tragicomedy. 28

The changing nature of the drama as it grew from Elizabethan to Jacobean, however, was itself no more than a part of the whole direction of change as English society left the Renaissance and entered into the Baroque. In the fine arts, for instance, the change was more abrupt and more obvious than in the drama. After Holbein left England the most important painting done in Britain was by the

British school whose finest representative was Nicholas Hilliard, the miniaturist,of Elizabeth's period. Hilliard continued as limner to James until his death in 1619, and the British school continued to produce portraits until well into the seventeenth century. In the middle of the second decade of his reign, however, James began to patronize a new sort of painter. He imported Baroque masters from the Lowlands and assigned to them the important tasks of creating the royal portraits. Paul Van Somer, then Daniel Mytens, and (under

Charles) the great Van Dyke, became the most important artists at the English court in nearly a century. They were popular and well patronized, and one cause for their popularity was their obviously

Baroque style. After Van Somer began to paint in England, only the minor lights of the Jacobean and Caroline courts had their portraits <.;o done in the older manner. In prose style, too, though there was no revolution such as

Morris Croll once over-enthusiastically attributed to the beginning of the seventeenth century, there was an evolution as more and more writing became basically "Senecan" and Baroque instead of Ciceronian

13 Inigo Jones (1573-1652), of course, is the first major Baroque artist in England, but his prominence was mostly ouside the area of pointing. 29 14 and Renaissance*

Similarly, in verse the Petrarchan "golden style" did not die with Spenser; it survived in hundreds of minor poets. The metaphysical style of Donne, however, became more prominent and more influential than the old Elizabethan style, and a basically Elizabethan poet like Drayton revealed its growing influence as he revised his sonnets into more and more metaphysical patterns during the Jacobean years.

In politics as in art, changes were beginning to take place during the first part of James I’s reign. Jacobean politics involved a retention of the basic governmental patterns established by Thomas

Cromwell and perfected by Elizabeth. James, however, operated within those constitutional patterns far less effectively than did his

Tudor relatives, and he altered a number of Elizabeth's major policies.

He retained Robert Cecil as secretary of state, but he relied upon’ the son of the great Lord Burghley far more than had the old Queen.

He also retained the Privy Council, but he exploited the possibilities of this crucial governing body in an ineffectual manner. He expanded it to unwieldy size, packed it with tractable but uninfluential statesmen, and failed to include any of the dominant powers from the House of Commons within it; all of which were mistakes never made by the canny old Elizabeth. James himself seldom bothered meeting with the Privy Councillors, leaving the mundane problems of day to day^overnance in the hands of Cecil. This was a mistake; James had elected a.policy of peace with Catholic Spain, and he needed to

^^Croll,, "Baroque Style." 30 exercise all possible forms of influence in order to make his aban­ donment of the Protestant Lowlands an acceptable procedure. Moreover, there were political and legal problems connected with the union of Scotland England; the English attitude of distrust toward the

Scots, manifesting itself explicitly within the Commons, enraged the

Scottish King, but it did not move him to improve his relations with the lower house. Then, too, there was the problem of religion and ecclesiastical policy. Having failed to establish a strong party of his own within the Commons, he had only the efforts of Bacon and

Cecil to stand in the way of the alliance between conservative lawyers and radical Protestants, an alliance which Coke was to lead eventually.

This coalition was already strong enough by 1610 to push through

Parliament a bill requesting the King to reverse his whole stand on

Church matters, especially his ideas of conformity within the clergy.

England's intellectual life, also, shifted direction during

James's reign; Chapter Two will discuss some of the philosophic currents of the period and their relationship to The Winter's Tale, but changes were beginning to appear at all levels of thinking. F. P.

Wilson's little book. Jacobean and Elizabethan (Oxford: Oxford 0.

Press, 1945), èxamines the nature of this change with some care, but it can almost be summarized in the statement that Hooker, working almost completely within the philosophic tradition of Renaissance

Humanism and deriving much of his thought from the Scholastic trad­ ition, was the greatest of the Elizabethan intellectuals while the greatest of the Stuart thinkers was the skeptical empiricist Bacon. 31

Wilson, of course, is aware that this kind of distinction between

Hooker and Bacon is too easy, too neat. Bacon himself was educated and began his career during Elizabeth's reign. He belongs in a philosophic tradition which precedes and informs the Renaissance, a tradition including such remarkable figures as Agrippa von Nette- sheim, Paracelsus, and Dr. John Dee. Moreover, the great Christian

Humanism of Hooker did not simply disappear after Bacon's rise to emitrence; it survived long and healthy enough to appear in Milton and the Cambridge Platonists. There was no sharp and sudden break, but there was a modification'in the relationship of the two trad­ itions,^^

The Winter's Tale, in brief, was the product of a society beginning to undergo large-scale changes in nearly all areas. In politics, art, thought, and style the Elizabethan norms had ceased to be normative, at least, though they had hardly disappeared, and new norms were being defined. Shakespeare, an artist who had always maintained intimate contact with the life of his age, did not fail to change too. There is no need for mystification about why the late plays seem so different from the earlier works; the world wasj b e - coming different,, and Shakespeare was part of his world. I

With the rest of society the dominant aesthetic of the period underwent large-scale alteration as England left the era of the

Tudors and entered the period of the Stuarts. As an historical ab­ straction, of course, an aesthetic is always both a participant in

15 Bacon and Hooker will be treated at more length in Chapter Two. 32 and a product of the general historical pattern of an era, and as

Jacobean thought and society were entering into their own uniquely seventeenth century patterns, the predominant Jacobean aesthetic was becoming more and more thoroughly Baroque. In 1611, when Shake­ speare first set The Winter's Tale before a theater audience, the general trend of the Jacobean aesthetic had not yet achieved the full bloom of its Baroque growth; that came later. But in 1611, the Baroque aesthetic had already begun to define itself and had clearly become something separate from the dominant aesthetic of the Elizabethan theater.

Carl J. Friedrich, for instance, views The Winter's Tale and

The Tempest as among the greatest achievements of the Baroque spirit in English art, and the whole body of English literature in the earlier seventeenth century conforms to his vision of the Baroque man as a seeker after power.This concern for power appears most clearly in the way Jacobean writers, especially dramatists, aimed at a different relationship with their audience than had their |

Elizabethan predecessors. George,Herbert, for instance, made the 18 avowed purpose of The Temple (1632) to "ryme thee to good." ^e wished to exploit the power of rhyme and meter in order to elevate his audience; in his own mind his sole justification for using the

16 See Pelligrini, Barocco Inglese, and Marco Mincoff, "Shake­ speare, Fletcher, and Baroque Tragedy," ShS, 20 (1967), 1-16. 17 Friedrich, Age of the Baroque, p. 48. 18 "Perirrhanterium," 1. 6, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941). 33 beauties of poetry rather than the plainness of prose was the added power of affective and emotive appeal which he could gain by using verse. The power of poetry was potentially dangerous; it could 19 mislead the mind and set it astray. In the hands of a morally upright poet, however, that self-same power could be turned to good use, and so he felt impelled to write verse in order to gain power over the audience. In contrast, Sidney desired to "look in his heart and write." Though thoroughly aware of poetry's power, he could not conceive of that power as separate from the poet's moral purpose.

It never occured to him that a poet, at least not a true poet, could do harm instead of good.

Fletcher's drama reveals the same concern for power as does

Herbert's poetiry. Withholding crucial information from the audience, a typical ploy in the plot structure of Fletcher's tragicomedies though a rare trick in earlier drama, put the audience at his mercy and enabled him to manipulate their emotions, keying them up or toning them down as he chose, far more easily than he could have if he had ^ v revealed the truth. Sensationalism also gave the dramatist an added control over the audience, and the Jacobeans brought the Elizabethan taste for sensational plots and theatrics to a new pitch. To the

Elizabethan stock of murder, revenge, and adultery, the Jacobeans added the titillating spice of incest, a main feature in plays by

Fletcher, Ford, and others. To the old theme of honor and the family's pride, they added situations of brother pandering for sister and of

l*See "Jordan (I)" and "Jordan (II):" 34 prostitute heroines. They sneered at the Elizabethan theatrics of hell-mouths and devils , but they developed the gratuitous sensation­ alism of DeFlores* hacking off the finger of Alsemero and the Duke of

Florence crawling into bed and caressing a corpse. The power to amaze, to control, and to direct the audience's emotion was what they sought, and it is clearly much this same kind of power which motivates the spectacle and theatrics of The Winter's Tale.

It is not really necessary, however, to think of the Jacobean

Baroque aesthetic in these sweeping terms. Even in a far moire re­ stricted and stylistic sense the major Jacobean style is demonstrably

Baroque. Madeleine Doran has proved that Elizabethan dramatic form is Renaissance, and she has shown that the basic principle of form­ alistic criticism set forth by Woelfflin applies as well to the his- 20 tory of literary art as to graphic and plastic creations. À brief application of the methods she has used to such good effect can help to explain how Jacobean drama is as thoroughly Baroque as Eliz­ abethan drama is Renaissance. In particular, it is possible to show that the formal unity typical of the major Jacobeans is the "unified unity" of the Baroque, not the "multiple unity" of the Renaissance.

Distinguishing the Baroque unity from its Renaissance pre­ decessor, Woellflin remarks that "On principle, the baroque no longer reckons with a multiplicity of co-ordinate units, harmoniously interdependent, but with an absolute unity in which the individual part has lost its individual rights. But thereby the main motive

20 Madelaine Doran, Endeavors of Art (Madison: Wisconsin Ü. Press, 1954). 35 21 is stressed with a hitherto unprecedented force.'* Notably, Woelf­

flin states this basic principle of formalistic analysis in words fully as applicable to literary criticism as to art history. For

art this principle means that Renaissance painters and architects rendered each element of a composition as though each one were both

intrinsically interesting and subordinate to the effect of the whole work. Baroque artists treated the separate element as though its sole value lay in its contribution to the effect of the whole. Thus, in one of Woelfflin's examples. Durer and Rembrandt use very different

techniques for handling the subordinate figures in their works on

22 " the death of the Virgin. Durer has four groups of figures placed around the central figure. Of these eleven men, only one is looking at the Virgin. The others are doing something else, either conversing with each other, reading, or performing some minor task. Each figure, in fact, engages in some activity which makes him a distinct indi­ vidual, interesting and, valuable in his own right. By their positions within the geometrical design controlling the composition (e.g.ij the heads of the men in the right foreground make a perfectly straight line leading to the head of the Virgin), they participate in the unified effect of the whole woodcut, but they remain particular individuals at the same time. In Rembrandt's etching only three of the nineteen clearly visible human figures are doing anything but gazing toward the Virgin, and these three are relegated to a shadowy comer* Figures who might well be doing something else— reading or

^^oelfflin, Principles, p. 157.

^^oelfflin. Principles, pp. 159-60. 36

praying— have raised their eyes from their books and folded hands

in order to stare at the Virgin in her final moment of worldly

life. Their actions, if rapt stares are actions, have no intrinsic or individual-interest; in fact, without the dying Virgin as the

center of their attention there is no way of deciding what they

are doing. The minor figures make no sense and have no interest

except in connection with the central theme of the work, and, con­ versely, the primary motive becomes extraordinarily strong and dramatic because nearly every element in the whole composition is so thoroughly devoted to reinforcing it. In Durer's Virgin's Death we have "a multiplicity of co-ordinate units, harmoniously interdependent'.';

in Rembrandt's The Death of Mary we have "an absolute unity in which

the individual part has lost its individual rights." But "thereby

the main motive is stressed with a hitherto unprecedented force."

In Elizabethan drama the dominant formal characteristic is

"multiple unity." Characters are interesting in their own right;

individual scenes and acts have their own integrity; particular;

I speeches and lines, even tropes and words, have a unique v a l u e j e v e n when viewed out of context. The effect of the whole drama depends upon the achievement of a harmonious balance among these independent but coordinate parts.

The taproot of such a concept of form reaches deep into the soil of Renaissance dramatic theory. Sixteenth century dramatic criticism, a mass of pseudo- and neo-classical commentary on Plautus,

Terence, Seneca, and a few modern authors, was richly rhetorical.in its 37 23 approach. In comedy particularly each scene was to present its own thesis; the play's total effect was the logical and rhetorical conclusion derived from the series of independent propositions de­ veloped by the individual scenes. Thus, the plot of a drama became its argument, a term derived from the rhetoricians? argumentum.

Regardless of the particular plot of a play, characters were to express the ethos which decorum dictated as appropriate to their types; thus, the form of each character depended upon ideas outside the individual play, and characterization assumed an intrinsic value of its own. Decorum further Insisted that dialogue be rhetor­ ically adjusted to fit the particular character and thus guaranteed that each line of dialogue have a rhetorical value of its own as well as an importance in the establishment of each scene's thesis.

Moreover, each act had a specific function to perform, and while

that function was keyed to help secure a total effect, the individual parts also hadtobe judged upon their efficacy in achieving their

individual goals as protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe.

Although such classical theorizing is hardly the sole in­

fluence upon Elizabethan dramatic structure, it certainly provides

a primary impulse toward the multiple unity of so many plays by

Shakespeare’s earlier contemporaries.^^ The contrast between the

23 See Thomas Whitfield Baldwin, Shakspere's Five-Act Structure (Urbana: Illinois U. Press, 1947), and Marvin T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. 34, Nos. 1 & 2 (Urbana: Illinois U. Press, 1950). 24 See, e.g., David M. Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1962), for the influence of Tudor popular drama before Marlowe. 38 multiple unity of a Renaissance play and the unified unity of a

Baroque play may help to explain this statement. Even in so obviously popular a,play as Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

(c. 1590) the unity of form is essentially multiple. Basically a celebration of the alchemist and magician Roger Bacon, and through his powers a celebration of England’s national virtues, the play includes two basic plots and three sets of characters (Oxford, the

Court, and Fressingfield) all existing more or less independently.

Each plot contributes to the glorification of Bacon’s achievements, yet each plot is intrinsically interesting. Prince Edward’s attach­ ment to Margaret, the milkmaid of Fressingfield, and his consequent conflict with the planning of his father is a story of its own;

Bacon is involved in some of the intrigue, but the fable remains inde­ pendent. At the same time, the story of the English court and its competition with the Hapsburgs for prestige, though it hinges upon

Bacon’s ability to defeat the German necromancer Vandermast and, thus, assert the dominance of the English national spirit, is also ' a separate story from the central issue of Bacon’s failure to create the potent "Brasen head" and, thus, erect a brass wall encircling

England and protecting the nation from foreign invaders (such as the Armada). The plots are unified in their praise of Bacon and his patriotic powers, but that unity does not prevent them from developing along their individual lines. The various scenes exist in the same sort of unified independence as the figures in Durer’s woodcut. With the exception of the first and last, each scene (i.e., each change of location and character) presents its own complete 39

thesis. Usually, this means that another of Bacon's more noteworthy

achievements is presented. In Scene Two, Bacon conjures Belcephon

and shames a skeptical Oxford don by bringing in the doubter’s para­ mour straight from her spit in a tavern kitchen. In Scene Four,

Bacon renders the Prince's men incapable of drawing their swords.

In Scene Six, he displays his "glass perspective," and so on. Each

scene develops a complete anecdote, a small story complete in itself,

in the magical career of the great Franciscan. They are unified in -

their glorification of Bacon, yet they are independent and interesting

in their own right. The separate speeches exhibit similar indepen­ dence. When Prince Ned waxes lyrical over Margaret, his speech has a Petrarchan value of its own, but it would have almost precisely

the same value in a poetical miscellany as it does in the play, for

it is developed for its own value as well as its contribution to

the play's theme (i.55-73). The play's formal unity, in fact, is obtained by coordinating a group of harmonious but independent

elements, not by subordinating individual elements to a single, dominating theme.

By the time of Beaumont and Fletcher the national taste pre- 25 f erred drama with a more Baroque and unified type of formal unity a.

In plays by these two collaborators, and particularly in works by

Fletcher alone, individual characters, scenes, and lines are always

carefully developed to emphasize their contribution to the central

theme. Characters,for instance, seem shallow and vapid when separated

25 See Pelligrini, Barocco Inglese. 40 from their function in the development of central ideas. Plots seem ludicrous when analyzed without reference to their purpose of contributing to the central motif of the whole work. All the sep­ arate parts of a play stand subservient to a single idea; they are carefully controlled to make certain that they articulate nothing independent of, and thus distracting from, the central effect being sought. That primary effect, thus, becomes extraordinarily strong, but the individual scenes, characters, and speeches are made extremely difficult tô.inteçpr.et when removed from their proper contexts.

In A King and No King (1611) the central motive is the elusive nature of reality. As the title suggests, the play focuses upon the paradoxes and problems attendant upon the equivocal nature of human knowledge, and every individual part in the drama has the sole function of developong that central idea. In contrast to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay the plots of A King and No King are closely welded.

The Tigranes-Spaconia story cannot develop except in relation to the primary plot of Arbaces and Panthea. Moreover, neither ploti has any value except as a carefully structured purveyor of theme. In Greene*s play, the narratives concern a romantic love affaf between a prince and a milkmaid, a royal marriage, and a necromancer's failure at his supreme attempt to control nature through art. In themselves fascinating, these stories are made to serve the purpose of national glorification, but they have merit simply as fable.

Beaumont and Fletcher's play, however, is indefensible when the plot is separated from the theme which motivates it. As fable, it is thin and contrived; morally, it is even worse. It is a tale of unadulterated 41

lust, of infidelity, of near incest, and of attempted murder, all

of which become justified in the end by a fortunate chance revealed

in the last scene. No wonder a recent editor refers to it as "a

subversion of the moral and intellectual code" of the Elizabethan

era, for he interprets the plot without reference to the single idea 26 which it was created to convey. The entire story is aimed at demonstrating the problems which inevitably arise when illusions

replace realities, when a man who is no king thinks he is a king.

If the tale be interpreted without reference to that final purpose,

then it must appear to be morally debased. The final scene of recog­ nition and revelation is not simply a fortunate way of untangling an i

immorali and difficult problem: it is the central factor in the nar­

rative, the point toward which the whole plot has been developing. As I

in plot, so also in characterization, the play utilizes a variety of techniques in presenting characters who reinforce the central idea. Interpreted without reference to that idea, Arbaces appears 27 to be a deeply passionate young man, torn between reason and will.

His salvation from the eventual sin of incest is strictly fortuitous, / and the play seems to end by affirming the immoral conclusion ^that the will is just as efficacious in moral issues as is the reason,

Arbaces, however, is actually a character trapped within a paradox,

A king, he is yet not a king, and every element in his characterization

Robert K. Turner, "Introduction" to Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, A King and No King, ed, Robert K, Turner (Lincoln: Nebraska U, Press, 1964), p, xxv, 27 See Arthur Mizener, "The High Design of A King and No King," MP, 38 (1940), 133-54, “ 42

emphasizes that one point. Though brave and good, Arbaces is lacking

in a kingly nature, for he is too passionate to be a responsible

leader. From his very first lines he tells the audience that he is

a man thrust into a position for which he is not suited. His passion

for his "sister” Panthea, horridly degenerate in a real king, is

actually the good and honest love which every courtier should feel

for his fair and virtuous queen. Its overwhelming force is simply

part of the playwrights* way of highlighting the problems attendant

upon Arbaces* paradoxical position in the world. If Arbaces failed

to feel a tremendous love for Panthea, he would be unnatural; as

a courtier he was born to feel such desire for his sovereign. To

interpret Arbaces without reference to this single, all-important

paradox is to misinterpret both his characterization and the morality which motivates the play.

Each scene, and almost every line as well, aims at developing

this central idea of the illusory nature of reality. The opening

scene of low comedy between the stalwart Mardonius and the cowardly

Bessus concerns Bessus* attainment of fame and reputation when,

attempting to flee from battle, his fear so maddened him that he

ran the wrong direction and inadvertently led a desperate but suc­

cessful charge. Like Arbaces Bessus is a man thrust into a prominence he does not merit and cannot bear gracefully. The purpose for his

presence in the play is to reinforce the central theme. In contrast

to Prince Ned in Greene's play, Arbaces* soliloquies and dialogues

expressing his love for Panthea do not develop lyrical passages of

intrinsic interest; rather, they allow Arbaces to expound upon the 43

incestuous nature of his passion for Panthea. Both his and Panthea's

speech returns again and again to the subjects of adoption and

disinheritance. Clearly, all that they say and do points directly

toward the recognition in the final scene; every speech aims at

developing the paradox and unreality of their situation.

Drama such as this has an extraordinarily close unity. No

part of the work can be interpreted without reference to the central

issue; trying to interpret Mardonius or Bessus, let alone Arbaces, without the context of the all-important final scene is like trying

to criticize Rembrandt*s etcHing of The Death of Mary without men­

tioning that the Mother of God is dying in the midst of the crowd

surrounding her bed. It is an impossibility which can lead only to

distortion and misinterpretation. The play sacrifices individual

integrity of scene, character, plot, and line in order to achieve power of central effect. To criticize it for aiming at Baroque uni­

fied unity instead of Renaissance multiple unity is the same thing

as to complain about Bernini failing to be Michaelangelo; it is

to discount the difference in aesthetic.

The Winter's Tale, a play closely contemporaneous with A King

and No King, is also Baroque. Its formal unity is the unified unity of

Beaumont and Fletcher, not the multiple unity of Greene or the earlier

Shakespeare. Its central theme, the conflict of faith with knowledge,

is a thoroughly Jacobean theme derived from the familiar Elizabethan

question of appearance and reality but phrased in terms which had grown and changed since Shakespeare had begun to investigate that

issue early in his career. That central theme, brought home with 44 truly amazing power in the play’s final scene, is the key which unlocks and explains the structure and characterization. Any attempt at interpreting the play without reference to that central issue is bound to be less than fully satisfactory. CHAPTER II

THE THEME OF SKEPTICAL FIDEISM

Before one can hope to form an honest critical evaluation

of The Winter's Tale, it is absolutely necessary to have a clear understanding of the play's central theme. Like A King and No King,

The-Winter's Tale is structured upon the Baroque principle of unified

unity. Its central theme is, thus, crucial in determining an inter­

pretation of the whole. The strange or anomalous characteristics

of the play's structure and form are direct results, in fact, of

the thematic issues dealt with by the play. The peculiarities of

the dramaturgy ("Exit pursued by a bear"), the unusual characters

(Time the Chorus), and the unprecedented surprise conclusion all

serve major functions in the development of the masn thème. Until

their primary thematic and expressive functions are understood there

is no way of explaining them adequately.

The play centers on the theme of skeptical fideism. Focusing .

primarily upon Leontes, and to a lesser extent Florizel, it examines

the philosophic and psychological conflicts which develop when faith,

the things a man believes, and knowledge, the things a man knows,

contradict each other. Displaying Leontes' faith in irreconcilable

opposition to his knowledge, the play achieves a comic resolution

only by offering a thoroughly skeptical rejection of knowledge coupled

4 5 46 with a thoroughly fideistic affirmation of faith. The first three acts, in fact, dramatize the most powerful of Renaissance skepticism's arguments for the vanity of reliance upon sensory and rational know­ ledge. The last two acts constitute a fideistic statement that wisdom consists of an unremitting faith in the goodness of both the world and the divine providence controlling events in the world.

The immediate loss of Hermione and Mamillius when Leontes denies faith in the oracle climaxes the development of a skeptical analysis of the uncertainty in all human knowledge. And the deeply moving moments when Leontes miraculously recovers his queen constitute an affirmation of the power of faith to achieve things deemed impos­ sible by knowledge.

Obviously, such a theme is widely divergent from the main themes of the great tragedies which Shakespeare was writing only a few years before The Winter!s Tale. Yet, it is not necessary to revert to some hypothetic mystico-religious conversion experience for an explanation of why Shakespeare would have changed. Such an exper­ ience may have redirected Shakespeare's life and art, of course; who knows? Whether it did or not, though, the main theme of The

Winter's Tale is really no more than a late development in Shake­ speare's long-standing interest in the theme of illusion and truth, appearance and reality. The problem of distinguishing true from false appears over and over again in the plays; it begins in the very earliest works, and it lies at the heart of the tragic issues :

^See Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Notes on Shakespeare's Work­ manship (New York; H. Holt, 1917), pp. 196-214, 254-70. 47 examined by the mature plays. The Winter's Tale simply carried this theme into a new level of perception and development. In order to understand the nature of this late attitude, however, it is nec­ essary to examine, albeit briefly, both the nature of Shakespeare's handling of the issue in the plays preceding The Winter's Tale and the changing intellectual context within which his ideas were devel- ping. In these two intimately related matters lies the key to under­ standing not only what the theme of The Winter's Tale is but also how that theme came to be.

In its barest outlines the pattern of Shakespeare's developing attitude toward the appearance-reality theme amounts almost to a paradigm of the whole English attitude toward the problem of know­ ledge in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The early plays express the problem in terms clearly derived from a century of English Humanist thinkers; they see the appearance-reality problem in preciselythe^same ethical and moral context as did Sidney,

Spenser, Hooker, and the earlier Tudor Humanists. The mature plays, especially the tragedies, continue to conceptualize the problem in much the same form as did the earlier works, but they probe the issue more deeply and discover a set of insoluble problems which develop from the Humanists' idea of knowledge. The late plays then recast the terms of the problem in order to achieve some of the same solutions as were being offered by the skeptical fideists, neo-Stoics, and other early seventeenth century developers of new philosophies.

Richard III is one of the first plays to put the appearance-re­ ality theme squarely at the center of the drama, and it treats the 48 issue in almost exactly the same way as had three generations of

Tudor Humanists. Richard is a villain whose villainy is cast in the same mold as Sidney’s Cecropia in the Arcadia and Spenser’s

Duessa and Archimago in The Faerie Queene. For all of them the problem of knowledge is a moral issue. Their evil depends upon the humanist belief that knowledge is the key to ethical conduct and that the mistaking of falsehood for truth is the primary cause of wrong actions.

The basic assumption, derived ultimately from Thomas Aquinas and central to English Humanism, is that men can know the truth and that knowledge of the truth is sufficient grounds for achieving 2 right ethical decisions. The great Hooker deals with this idea in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, especially Book One, Chapter

Seven. He says, "two principal fountains there are of human action, 3 Knowledge and Will." The will, of course, is the active faculty which moves one to act upon a decision. Knowledge is the passive quality of recognizing the various choices available and their rel­ ative goodness and evil. Now knowledge, particularly knowledge of relative goodness, "is seen with the eye of the understanding. And the light of that eye is Reason." Thus, "Reason is the director of

2 Hiram Collins Haydn, in The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Scribners, 1950), views Hooker and the whole tradition of Renaissance Humanism as directly descended from Scholasticism, and he sees Montaigne, Bacon, and the ’Counter-Renaissance’ figures as reactions against Scholastic and Humanist assumptions. 3 Richard Hooker, The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr. Richard Hooker, ed. John Keble, 2nd edi (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1841), I, 220. 49 4 man's Will by discovering in action what is good." A man's reason

allows him to know with certainty what is a right action and what

is a wrong; "Reason" is the light "whereby good may be known from . . .

evil." Reason can always discover the truth of what is good, what

evil. "There is not that good which concemeth us, but it hath

evidence enough for itself, if Reason were diligent to search it out."^ Thus, rationally achieved knowledge is central to all ethical

and moral decision.

This is the source of the problem of knowledge, for the Human­

ists knew full well that men sometimes made morally wrong decisions.

Their way of accounting for those errors was to attribute them largely

to faulty knowledge. Through neglecting a diligent, rational perusal

of our situations, says Hooker, "abused we are with the show of that which is not." Sometimes Satan tricks us; sometimes our wills act

overhastily; sometimes our own evil blinds us; but we fail to see

the truth, accept appearances for realities, and consequently make

erroneous moral choices. "If Reason err,',' therefore, "we fall into

evil."^

Spenser and Sidney set forth this same doctrine in poetic form.

To achieve holiness, the Redcrosse Knight must first defeat the dragon

Error, and his most potent enemies are Duessa and Archimago, who

keep him from his goal by abusing him with false show. When he ac­

cepts their contrived appearances for realities, his reason errs.

^Hooker, Works, I, 222. ^Hooker, Works, X, 224.

^Hooker, Works, I, 225. 50 and he falls into evil. Sidney represents the vile Cecropia attemp­ ting to traduce Philoclea and Pamela into atheism and fornication by tempting them, not with material goods, but with argumentative assaults upon their reason in the hope of deluding them into accepting 7 falsehood for truth.

Richard III fits neatly into the same pattern as Archimago and Cecropia. His evil, like theirs, consists not only of his dia­ bolical ability to know the truth yet still will the evil but also of his cunning power to manipulate appearances in such a way as to keep others from knowing the truth, thus deluding them into error.

For Hooker, the ability to ignore the dictates of reason was at­ tributable to an untutored mind in which the animal appetites had never been properly balanced by the development of the reason.

The ability to inveigle things in such a way that falsehood appears g real, however, he attributes to Satan. Spenser and Sidney say the same things about their villains, and Richard, too, is supposed to be a diabolical character. "Foul devil. . . thou hast made the happy 9 earth thy hell," says Anne to him (I.ii.50-51). She continues to refer to him as a devil throughout the scene in which he convinces her to marry him by using a series of arguments which completely

Sir Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembroke's Arcadia, III, 5 & 10, in The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1922), I, 376-81, 402-10. O , Hooker, Works, I, 2 2 4 . 9 The text of Shakespeare cited here and throughout is The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, general ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Pelican, 1 9 6 9 ) . 51 distort the truth and make his murders appear to result from his love for her. The character’s greatness, in factt, lies in his power to manipulate appearances at all times in such a way that character after character fails to see the truth. His whole career is premised on his ability to hide the truth, for if one other soul were to know the real situation, Richard would die in an instant. His entire story is a study in his leading other people’s reason into error and then watching it fall into his own evil.

The great tragedies continue to see the problem of knowledge in essentially the same terms as did Richard III, but they present the issue as far more complex and difficult than it seems in Richard

III, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, The Faerie Queene, or the Arcadia. Like Fulke Greville and Sir Walter Ralegh, Shakespeare seems to have seen that the Humanists' belief in the primacy of reason and knowledge was not a completely satisfactory way of understanding human ethics and actions. He offers, though, no alternative view and instead places the problem of knowledge at the ethical crux of the tragic issue in play after play.

Othello is the play in which the problem of distinguishing appearance from reality receives its most desperate analysis, and it is useful to deal with because of its obvious kinship to The Winter’s

Tale. All of the mature plays, of course, reject the idea that reason can always distinguish the good from the illusions obscuring it and thus act as infallible guide to ethical behavior. In You

Like It, Rosalind trifles rather freely with appearances yet remains untainted morally and, in fact, improves everyone's condition without 52

their knowing it. Certainly in Hamlet mere knowledge of the truth, •

even though the knowledge is twice confirmed, does not seem to clarify automatically the ethically right course of action for the young prince to follow. King Lear can be treated as a full study in the bitter price which a man must sometimes pay simply to discover what

the truth is. And Macbeth centers on the ironic ambiguities which

the truth can contain even when it is known.

Othello, however, is the work which most thoroughly probes

into the problems of the Humanists' ideas, for it relies upon the idea

that "if reason err" then tragic evil must result, but it goes on to

confront the universal problems which men face when they try to figure out what the truth really is. As a dramatist rather than a philosopher, allegorist, or romancer, Shakespeare had to deal with

the realities of individual human minds. In so doing, he hit upon

the realization that the mind has no way of achieving certainty, no reliable method of distinguishing apparent from real, because the mind itself is largely responsible for those very appearances -which

lead reason astray. When reason mistakes illusion for reality, evil

ensues; yet reason has no foolproof way of discovering when the mind

itself has created illusions, and tragedy thus becomes an inevitable

part of existence. The world itself conspires to keep a man from distinguishing the truth from appearances. Not only do diabolical

lagos spread falsehood, but innocent Dcsdcmonas conceal truths and keep the most diligent inquirers from full understanding. Moreover,

the mind itself is filled with fears, passions, and desires which,

to use Sidney's antithesis, force our "infected will" to distort 53 and pervert the "erected wit."^^ Even noble minds like Othello's have no way of being certain when they have indeed separated the truth from illusions, and yet men must act on the basis of what they "know" the truth to be. Tragedy, obviously, must be an unavoid­ able part of existence in such a universe, and it can come no matter how noble a man's intentions or how great his abilities. No matter how right his intentions, a man's actions will go wrong if his reason fails to provide him adequate knowledge of his situation. Othello examines the tremendous difficulties men have in achieving knowledge.

The late plays continue the theme of knowledge, but they reject the Humanists' analysis of the issue and substitute a whole new ap­ proach. The Winter's Tale in particular takes on the very same problems as are raised in Othello, but the later play ends in comic resolution instead of unavoidable tragedy. It achieves its happy conclusion by insisting that knowledge, in fact, is not the proper basis for ethical decision at all. Restricted by its nature to dealing with unreliable appearances and subjective judgments, knowledge cannot serve as a guide to the truth or the right; it is untrustworthy.

Faith is the proper standard for ethical behavior. A man should believe in the goodness of his fellow men, of the universe, and of the providence controlling the universe. A man should frame his actions on the basis of these beliefs even when he knows that his faith is impossible. Knowledge, in fact, is always knowledge of appearances;

^^Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy, in Works, III, 9. 54 faith is man's only way of penetrating to the truths of things.

Like his earlier Humanistic concepts of the appearance-reality theme, Shakespeare's late understanding of the issue has sources and analogues in the thoughts of many contemporaries.^^ Originally, the sort of skeptical fideism examined in The Winter's Tale entered

Western thinking during late antiquity. Tertullian's '* certont eat quia impossibille" dnd Augustine's doctrine that faith must precede and inform understanding are two early statements of faith's proper dominance over knowledge. The Thomistic synthesis of faith and know- • ledge, in fact, solved a problem already centuries old at the time of his writing, and even his solution stood unchallenged for only a short while. Ockham's razor split faith and knowledge almost as soon as Thomas Aquinas joined them. The main currents of Renaissance

Humanism with its confidence in the power of human reason accepted the Thomistic synthesis, but throughout the Renaissance many major figures allied themselves with the aberrant tradition of skeptical doubt in man's capacity to know anything. Agrippa von Nettesheim,

Paracelsus, and a host of other astrologers, alchemists, and "empirics" had grave doubts about the power of reason, especially abstract reason, to attain any certain conclusions. Thomas a Kempis and the entire pietist tradition represented by his work regarded knowledge as

^^The following list includes the major secondary sources of;.' for my statements concerning skeptical fideism: Haydn, The Counter-Ren­ aissance; Herschel Clay Baker, The Wars of Truth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1952); Richard Henry Popkin, The History of Skep­ ticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Assen: Van Gorcum^1960); Louis Ignatius Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (Ann Arbor: Michigan U. Press, 1934); Henry G. Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Cer­ tainty in English Thought, 1630-1690, International Archives of the History of Ideas, 3 (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1963). 55 a vanity separating men from faith in the precepts of Christ and the

Church. The great Erasmus himself espoused skeptical fideism; debating with Luther the relative importance of knowledge of scripture and trust in the Church, he argued that all human knowledge is uncertain and that consequently man has no choice but to place his faith in the Church. Among sixteenth century Italian Humanists, Sadoleto and others developed a rather crude form of academic skeptical ar­ gument, based on hints in Cicero, defending faith in the Church against

Calvinist arguments.

It was only with the re-introduction of classical Greek skep­ ticism into European thought, however, that Renaissance skepticism began to burgeon from a relatively minor and uninfluential sub-cur­ rent into a major intellectual stream. In 1562 the French scholar and printer Estienne published his Latin translation of the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus, and a few years later Gentian Hervet, the

Counter-Reformer, published a Latin translation of Sextus* complete works. The influence of the newly rediscovered Pyrrhonic skepticism was immediately felt. Apparently, an English translation of Sextus was done in the 1580’s, though only a fragment of it survives, and it 12 has been attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh. Far more important, however, was Montaigne's assimilation of Greek skepticism. The longest and most philosophically substantial of the essays, the

Apology for Raymond Sebond, incorporates all of the skeptical ar-

12 See Ernest Albert Strathmann, Sir Walter Ralegh; A Study in Elizabethan Skepticism (New York: Columbia U. Press, 195l), pp. 220-8. 56 guments against knowledge, certainty, and dogmatism into a neatly . ordered refutation of Sebond's scholastic rationalism. Other essays, of course, reveal the Influence of Sextus on Montaigne, and it was

largely through Montaigne that Charron was later to derive his sys­ tematically skeptical fideism. The Portuguese Sanchez, too, drew upon

Sextus Empiricus in formulating his scientific and empirical skep­

ticism in his Quod nihil scitur. Many French Counter-Reformation thinkers, particularly among the Jesuits, adapted Pyrrhonic skepticism into fideistic arguments in defense of the Church against the Calvin- 13 ists.^

In its essence this kind of continental and generally Catholic

Pyrrhonic skepticism was not a philosophic system but rather a counter­ system. Its aim was to create doubt rather than to advance theses, and its whole purpose was to disprove the certainty of any assertion known to be true .bet not to assert anything. For Montaigne and his disciple Charron, the beauty of skepticism was that it demonstrated man's inability to know anything with certainty. All knowledge, ac­ cording to one of their most important borrowings from Sextus, de­ rives from the senses; the mind is born totally ignorant, and ev­

erything which it learns comes through sensory impression. The senses, however, are misleading. For one thing, the senses of no two men perceive the same things. Witnesses to a single event report different occurrences. Some men see colors which other men cannot see. More tellingly, the senses of a single individual contradict

13 ■ • • Popkin, History of Skepticism, and Bredvold, Intellectual Milieu, are especially concerned with Jesuit uses of skepticism. 57

themselves. Place a stick half in a pool of clear water and half

out of the pool; what happens? The sense of sight will show that

the stick is bent at the point where it enters the water. The sense

of touch will say that the stick is straight. Which one should a man

rely upon? All knowledge being dependent upon acquisition by the

senses, then no knowledge is completely trustworthy. Another essen­

tially Pyrrhonic argument takes up the idea of certainty. In order

to be certain of the truth, one must have standards by which to judge

the truth when it is apprehended; otherwise, how would one be certain

that he knew the truth? But the standards themselves must be true,

too; and how is one to be certain of his standards without a standard

by which to judge them? Each standard implies another standard in

infinite progression. Certainty becomes, thus, impossible, for there

is no way of establishing certainty for the standards except through

arbitrary decision to call one standard correct, even though there

is no way of being sure that the standard is really right.

Not surprisingly, this kind of skepticism was not destructive

of religion for Montaigne, Charron, and many Counter-Reformers. For

Charron, at least, it was the very basis of right religion, for it

cleared the air of individual dogmatizing about scriptural and spir-

itual matters and left a man no choice but to put his trust and

faith in the Church. Though the Church later refuted both his and

Montaigne's fideistic belief that a man's final reliance was upon

an irrational act of faith, Charron felt that the only certainty c-

came through a-denialcfknowledge and that truth could only be gained

through faith, not knowledge. Montaigne, in Florio's translation 58

of the concluding sentences of the Apology for Raymond Sebond,

summarizes his skeptical fideism thus:

Oh what ^ vile and ab.ject thing is man Csaith he ^enecaj ) uniesse he raise himself above humanity! Observe here a notable speech, and a profitable desire; but likewise absurd. . . . to hope to straddle more than our legs length; is impossible and monstrous: nor that man should mount over and above himselfe or humanity; for, he cannot see but with his owne eyes, nor take hold but with his owne armes. He shall raise himselfe up, if it please God extraordinarily to lend him his helping hand. He may elevate himselfe by forsaking and renouncing his owne meanes, and suffering himselfe to be elevated and raised by meere heavenly meanes. It is for our Christian faith, not for his Stoicke vertue, to pretend or aspire to this divine Metamorphosis, or miraculous transmutation.

Faith, for Montaigne, is man's only way of improving the otherwise miserable lot which he has when left to purely human devices.

This sort of Pyrrhonic skeptical fideism did not really begin

to make its influence felt in England until the early years of the

seventeenth century when Florio translated Montaigne (1603) and

Samson Lennard translated Charron (c. 1612).^^ By then Bacon had

already begun to formulate his own highly influential type of em­

pirical skepticism independent of the Pyrrhonic style.

^^Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays, trans. John Florio (London: Dent, 1910), II, 325-6.

^^Pierre Charron, Of Wisdom, Three Books Written in French, trans. Samson Lennard (London, c. 1612; Ann Arbor: Univ. Microfilms). It was originally entered in the Stationers' Register on Jan. 17, 1606.

^^In the essay " O f Truth" Bacon refers to the skeptics as "gone," meaning the classical Academy. He refers slightingly to some modern imitators, but it seems doubtful that he could have dismissed either Estienne or Montaigne so breezily had he been aware of their skeptical attitudes. He may have been referring to some of the Englishmen men­ tioned by Strathmann, Ralegh, pp. 226-7. See The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon 59

Of course, Tudor England had its share of dissenters from the

Humanist mainstream, and some of them were skeptics of a sort. Fulke

Greville, for one, and Sir Walter Ralegh, for another, were skeptics but only in a vague sense of the term. They were doubters but not particularly consistent or systematic about their doubt.The pious skepticism of Thomas a Kempis had its followers in England, as is witnessed by the frequency with which the Imitatio was trans­ lated. And the radically empirical skepticism of Agrippa von Nette­ sheim appeared not only in translations of his works but also in analogous, and anomalous, works by men like John Dee. Yet all these figures must be thought of as at least slightly aberrant, for none of them exerted profound or lasting influence upon the major thought patterns of their time.

Late in the 1590’s, however, and still more so in the early

1600's, Francis Bacon began formulating an essentially skeptical idea of knowledge which, profoundly influential upon his contempor- • 18 aries, deserves particular mention. In 1605 he published The

Advancement of Learning; in it he argues exactly contrary to Hooker.

Primary to the advancement of the state of human knowledge, he says, is the need not to confuse faith with knowledge. Men must not, he maintains, "presume by the contemplation of nature to attain to the

^^(continued) Heath (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1860-82), XII, 81.

^^See Don Cameron Allen, Doubt's Boundless Sea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1964).

*1 Q See Van Leeuwen, Certainty. 60 19 mysteries of God." To the contrary, contemplation of nature must be a very separate activity from the contemplation of the mysteries of God; the one activity is the province of knowledge, the other of faith. Those two functions can only be mutually contaminated and' vitiated by confusion with each other. To improve the condition of learning, men must separate knowledge from religion and then apply science to real problems. Bacon, however, was keenly awate of the problems confronting empirical science, and most pressing of these was the human mind itself. During the first decade of the seventeenth century. Bacon arrived at a skepticism in many ways parallel to 20 Agrippa’s. He summarized this idea in the New Organon (published

1620) with the doctrine of the four idols keeping men from understan­ ding the truth when they saw it. He disagreed with Academic skeptics who felt that no knowledge was ever possible, but he disagreed still more with all varieties of dogmatic certainty that truth was already known. He sympathized with the Pyrrhonic ideal, so far as he under­ stood it, of constant doubt, and his own ideal was to formulate an empirical logic which, though it might never achieve absolute certainty, would aid and correct the unreliable human mind by guiding it through progressive degrees of uncertainty until it could be relatively sure of some truths, at least. Constantly misled by the idols of the tribe, marketplace, cave, and theater, the human mind could know things with certainty only when it was guarded and corrected by a method

^^Bacon, Works, VI, 95. 20 See Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon; An Essay on Its Development,1603-1609 (Liverpool: Liverpool U. Press, 1964). 61 operating independent of the mind itself.

In the first decade of the seventeenth century, then, two different strains of skeptical thought were beginning to flourish in the English intellectual climate. Needless to say, neither skeptical pattern could immediately topple the powerful Humanistic tradition;

Milton and the Cambridge Platonists have their roots deeply imbedded in the thought of the Tudor Humanists and their scholastic forebears.

Yet already in 1603, the year Florio translated, or first published, his Montaigne, a minor figure like John Chamber was using Pyrrhonistic 21 arguments to refute the claims of astrology. By 1617 Lord Herbert of Cherbury felt willing to publish his skeptical De Veritate, and a few years later Sir Thomas Browne could argue for a full blown skeptical fideism of the same type as Montaigne's and Charron's.

The skeptical empiricism of Bacon, regardless of its small contri­ bution to the real state of science, exerted tremendous influence on the empirical methodology and skepticism of men like Gtanville, 22 Chillingworth, Tillotson, and Wilkins. It seems fair to say that ; : ; in the early years of the century, skeptical thinking was establishing itself as a major challenger to the Humanistic tradition, although it would not achieve its full growth until later in the period.

Before moving on to an examination of The Winter's Tale within this context', we need to notice one more point about the English skepticism.of the early seventeenth century. Wherever it appears it

21 John Chamber, A Treatise Against Ivdiclal Astrologie (London: 1601; Ann Arbor: University Microfilms). 22 See Van Leeuwen, Certainty. 62 is associated with Senecanistn. The nature of seventeenth century

Stoicism has, of course, been debated extensively, particularly in reference to its influence on prose style. The basic outlines, though, seem clear enough. The early sixteenth century English Humanists inherited the Boethian tradition from the middle ages. They also 23 inherited a Senecan tradition in moral thought and education..

They combined these two strains with their growing knowledge and understanding of Seneca’s whole works, and the upshot was the creation of comfort books, clearly Boethian in impulse, by men like Thomas 24 More and Girolamo Cardano. Later in the sixteenth century men such as Montaigne, DuVair, Charron, and Lipsius transformed this sort Of traditional Christian Stoicism into a more purely classical sort of

Stoic thinking. Instead of viewing Stoic arguments as essentially useful in times of personal hardship and "tribulation," they culti­ vated an ideal of consistent impassivity to the world and inward self-cultivation.'Drawing upon Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Tacitus, and others as well as Seneca, Lipsius and Montaigne recommended resignation before a world whose ways were incomprehensible and acceptance of a universe which meted out justice on a scale too large for man to understand. The cultivation of inner harmony and strength was at all times the ideal; withdrawal from the world and Independence from the rest of mankind was the only way to escape from fortune’s

^^See Roseraond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (Princeton ; Princeton U. Press, 1966).

^^Thomas More, A Dialogue of Comforte against Tribulation, ed, Leland Miles (Bloomington; Indiana U. Press, 1965);Girolamo Cardano, Cardanus Comforte, trans. Thomas Bedingfield (London, 1576; facsimile rpt. New York: De Capo Press, 1969). 63 whim. Lipsius, for one, would even go so far as recommending that a man free himself from the entrammeling impulse of such Christian 25 virtues as pity for other men. All events being the effect of fortune, chance, destiny, and, thus, ultimately of providence, all events are right and must be accepted as such without regret or ques~lt> tion by the man of true Stoic strength. In England, the Stoic impulse appears especially in Bacon and more so still in Chapman, but it is clearly there in Herbert of Cherbury, Browne, and others. It is difficult to argue for a causal relationship associating Stoic ideas with skepticism, but it is impossible to argue that the two are not intimately associated in Montaigne, Charron, Bacon, Herbert of Cher­ bury, and the other seventeenth century skeptics.

It is within this changing intellectual context, then, that

The Winter's Tale should be interpreted. Like many other Englishmen raised and trained in the Humanistic, tradition, Shakespeare seems to have found in skeptical fideism the solutions to some of the problems in the orthodox Humanist view of man and the universe.

In The Winter's Tale he dramatizes a pattern closely analogous to

Montaigne's and Charron's arguments. In the first part of the play he analyzes the problems inherent in all reliance upon merely human ways of knowing; in the second part he reveals how a man "may elevate himselfe by forsaking and renouncing his owne meanes, and suffering

25 Justus Lipsius, T w o Bookes of Constancie, trans. Sir John Stradling, ed. Rudolf Kirk and Clayton Morse Hall (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers U. Press, 1939), pp. 98-100. See also Jason Lewis Saunders, Justus Lipsius: The Philosqhy of Renaissance Stoicism (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1955). 64 26 himselfe to be-elevated and raised by meere heavenly meanes."

Leontes, obviously, stands at the center of the play's dramatic

action. The whole play turns around the two separate occasions when he must make a decision between irreconcilable opposites contained within his own character. Twice, at the two climactic moments in the

action, he must choose between his faith and his knowledge. There

is no mediating decision, for the two quantities are absolutely juxtaposed. In the first decision, he chooses to know rather than

to believe, to know Hermione guilty rather than believe her innocent.

The tragic consequences of his decision are immediate. In his second decision, he chooses to believe she lives, although he knows she is dead. The nearly miraculous results of his faith are sudden.

Almost as soon as he comes on stage, Leontes begins to demon­

strate some of the basic skeptical arguments concerning the unreli­ ability of knowledge. Hermione, having convinced Polixenes to extend his visit, walks aside with him, leaving Leontes alone. As he observes his wife standing apart with his friend, Leontes comes to

"know" of their adultery. His knowledge comes, as does all knowledge, from the operation of his reason on the phenomena reported by his

senses. Like all such knowledge, it is unreliable because the senses

themselves are undependable and because the "idol of the tribe," in

Bacon's terminology, warps perception and reason without even re­ vealing its presence. As Hermione talks with Polixenes, Leontes

sees them "paddling palms and pinching fingers,/ . . . and making

26 Montaigne, Essays, II, 326. 65

practiced smiles" (I.ii.115-6), In reality they may be merely holding hands and laughing as good friends sometimes do. Some directors

choose to have their stage business seem more intimate; it is irrel­

evant* In either case, Leontes sees the behavior of lovers, the

touching, smiling, and sighing of secret friends. This is what he

sees, but this is not what is before him, for the two are not lovers

at all. His senses are revealing something that is not there in

reality. "Too hot, too hot," he says, but it is his own "tremor

cordis" which supplies the heat. He succumbs to the idol of the tribe; his understanding "distorts and discolours the nature of things by 27 mingling its own nature with it." The vague jealous passion aroused

in him by Hermione*s ability to convince Polixenes where he had

failed distorts his perception, and yet he has no way of knowing

that he is seeing a warped picture, for he himself is distorting

things. His knowledge is as certain and as reliable as any man's; it

is neither certain nor reliable at all.

His knowledge of Hermione’s guilt brings Leontes into immediate

conflict with a series of characters holding faith in her innocence.

This group of challengers not only heighten the dramatic tension

as they progressively become more vehement in their contentions with

the King, they also clarify the nature of the conflict, and they

help set the tone of the final confrontation when Leontes finds

his adversary to be Apollo himself.

Camillo is the first to tell Leontes that faith in the Queen's

27 Bacon, Novum Organum, Aphorism 39, in Works, VIII; 76. 66 goodness should supersede even the surest knowledge of her evil. Not r once does Camillo t r y t o prove Hermione innocent or disprove Leontes* knowledge. His whole argument depends upon his faith in her and upon

Leontes’ obligation to hold a similar faith. Leontes broaches the topic

to Camillo by suggesting that the counsellor must have the same knowledge as the King. Setting forth the progression from sense to reason, he suggests, "Ha* not you seen, Camillo— / . . . or heard— /

. . . or thought .../.../My wife is slippery" (l.ii.266-

71). Any man with an ordinary complement of senses and mind must know that Hermione is an adulteress, and if Camillo thinks otherwise he must have reasons for so thinking. Camillo, however, has no

arguments based on sense or reason; his only cause for thinking

the Queen innocent is his faith. "I would not be a stander-by to hear/ My mistress clouded so" (l.ii. 278-9). He cannot argue with

Leontes* knowledge; he can only tell the King to have faith no matter what he knows;

You never spoke what did become you less Than this, which to reiterate were sin As deep as that, though true. (l.ii.281-3)

To know her guilty when he should believe her innocent is a sin,

even though she actually be an adulteress. Faith in Hermione, counsels

Camillo, should govern the King’s actions no matter what he knows

about her. Camillo can only tell him to be cured of "this diseased opinion?? and when Leontes shouts "*tis true" Camillo can only shout back "No, ho, my lord." Leontes relying on faith, Camillo on knowledge,

the two have no common ground upon which to meet and talk; they can only shout at each other. 67

Hermione next argues faith against Leontes* knowledge. When accused of adultery and treason, her response is to say that she thought he knew her too well to believe such a thing; her own faith in him is such that she thought his faith in her would endure all tests. "I'll be sworn you would believe my saying,/ Howe'er you lean to the nayward" (II.i.63-4); her word alone, she feels, should convince him of her innocence no matter how great the proof against her. 'i.

Leontes, however, considering himself "blest . . ./ In my just cen­ sure, in my true opinion" while simultaneously crying out,"Alack, for lesser knowledge" (II.i.36-8), knows what he knows rather than believe what he should believe. She analyzes his problem well enough:

"You, my lord,/ Do but mistake" (80-1). She offers no proof, though, either positive or negative, and she mounts no arguments to demonstrate where he has gone wrong. He persists in proclaiming:

be't known

She's an adult'ress. (76-8)

Finding that he has lost his faith in her, Hermione cannot argue with him. She can only warn him of the grief to come when he arrives at "clearer knowledge." Like Camillo she cannot argue with his know­ ledge when he rejects her only defense, faith.

As Hermione withdraws to prison, a new assailant continues the assault upon Leontes. An anonymous Lord takes up the issue, be­ seeching Leontes to recall the queen:

For her, my lord, I dare my life lay down and will do't, sir. Please you t'accept it, that the queen is spotless I'th'eyes of heaven and to you . . . (II.i.130-2). 68

Like the others, he has only his faith to argue from. When Leontes asks, "What lack I credit?" the unnamed Lord makes it clear that, given a choice between extending "credit" to Leontes’ accusations of guilt and Hermione’s assertions of innocence, the better option is the

Queen: "... more it would content me/ To have her honor true than your suspicion" (159-60).

In this same conversation, however, Antigonus is a more inter­ esting participant, for he is involved in the same kind of error as

Leontes and, thus, casts both the King and the Lord into a clearer light. When the Lord first speaks out against Leontes’ tyranny, An­ tigonus joins him, but while the original protester speaks in ab­ solute terms of Hermione’s innocence, Antigonus uses conditional phraseology. He admits the possibility of the Queen’s guilt. He consistently states his case in "if . . . then . . ." constructions.

If it prove She’s otherwise. I’ll keep my stables where I lodge my wife. (II.i.133-5)

If this prove time, they’ll pay for it. (146)

If it be so. We need no grave to bury honesty; (154-5)

If the good truth were known. (199)

The key words in his conditional phrases are "prove" and "known."

Antigonus does not think the Queen guilty, but his faith is not ab­ solute; he admits the possibility. Like Leontes he believes the possibility can be confirmed by proofs which will allow the truth to be known. Leontes tells Antigonus that the source of his knowledge is the senses; he tells the old courtier "You smell this business 69 with a sense as cold/ As is a dead man's nose; but I do see't and feel't” (150-51). Antigonus admits that the matter can be known by such means. In contrast to Camillo, Hermione, and the unspecified

Lord, Antigonus advises, "Be certain what you do" and try the matter carefully "in your silent judgment." Rather than faith, he urges a careful knowledge. Leontes, however, is committed to knowledge as solid as sense and reason can make it; Antigonus' advice is wasted.

What Leontes needs is faith, not knowledge.

In this same conversation with the Lord and Antigonus,

Leontes' conflict begins to assume the universal proportions which it will fully assume in Act Three. Antigonus extends Hermione's plight to include all mankind in some of the speeches previously mentioned. In his first speech he shows that both the King and Mam­ illius are included in Hermione's situation (11. 127-30). His next lines (133-9) extend the issue first to his own family and then to all of womankind: "every dram of woman's flesh is false,/ If she be." Finally, he extends the case to all human virtue:

If it be so. We need no grave to bury honesty; There's not a grain of it the face to sweeten Of the whole dungy earth. (154-7)

Leontes' knowledge threatens not just Hermione but all of human goodness. It is Leontes, however, who puts the issue on a cosmic scale, for he is the one to call in the gods. He has sent to Apollo's oracle at "sacred Delphos." He is not sending there, however, for an answer to an issue which he cannot resolve, for he is quite sure of what he knows. 70

Though I am satisfied and need no more Than what I know, yet shall the oracle Give rest to the minds of others, such as he Whose ignorant credulity will not Come up to th* truth. (II.i.188-93)

Leontes is content that what he knows is the truth; he sends only to satisfy those whose unknowing faith, "ignorant credulity" in his eyes, refuses to see the truth he sees. He wishes from Apollo nothing more than "a greater confirmation" for his knowledge (180). In Leontes* world knowledge comes first; it is the key to certainty. Faith has the role of conforming to knowledge and supporting it. In this mis- ordering of reality, in putting human means above divine, Leontes reveals the folly of his Ji-hinking.

Leontes faces one more spokesman for faith, and this the most potently dramatic of all, before his final crisis. Paulina challenges him to give over the madness of his accusations and re-accept Hermione and the child accused of being Polixenes* bastard. Like Camillo and Hermione before her, Paulina shares but small ground with Leontes.

Their differences are so great that dialogue between them amounts to little more than a dhouting match. Paulina states that she has come as spokesman for the "good queen" (ll.iii.58). Leontes responds,

"Good queen?" And Paulina can only insist upon her terminology,

"Good queen, my lord,/ Good queen. I say good queen" (59-60). Before things boil down to simple and infuriated name-calling ("tyrant,"

"madman," "witch," and "callet" are but some of the terms they bandy),

Paulina does have a chance to indicate her position. She stands upon her faith in Hermione. She says .'she "would by combat make her good, so were 1/ A man, the worst about you" (60-61). Trial by combat, she 71 feels, would be proof enough of Hermione*s innocence, for even the poorest fighter would win in battle for so just a cause. To trust in trial by combat surely demands a supreme faith.

Paulina's shouting match with Leontes heightens the tension of the drama and serves the plot function of starting Perdita on her banishment, but it does not really add to the theme. The next major thematic advances are reserved for the trial scene in Act

Three. Paulina's primary function has simply been to indicate the total irreconcilability of Leontes' conflict with those who speak for faith.

In the trial scene Hermione once again states the issue. Leontes must have faith in her innocence or know that she is guilty. When arraigned, she says:

Since what I am to say must be but that Which contradicts my accusation, and The testimony on my part no other But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me To say, 'Not guilty.' Mine integrity. Being counted falsehood, shall, as I express it. Be so received. (III.ii.21-7)

Yet she perseveres in her own faith that the gods will vindicate her:

But this: if powers divine Behold our human action, as they do, I doubt not then but innocence shall make False accusation blush and tyranny Tremble at patience. (27-31)

She knows that Leontes is believing an illusion and tells him so;

"My life stands in the level of your dreams" (80). He cannot be dislodged from his error, though, except by faith, which he rejects as folly. Her only recourse is to the gods: "I do refer me to the 72 oracle./ Apollo be my judge" (114-5).

The oracle is brought in, and it exonerates Hermione, Camillo, and Polixenes. Leontes must now face up to the conflict and make a decision. Faith has not proven a "greater confirmation" to knowledge.

In fact, his faith and his knowledge contradict each other totally, and he must choose one, reject the other. He hesitates for a moment, asking the messenger, "Hast thou read truth?" The question is signif­ icant, for the whole question of truth is at stake, and Leontes is asking himself this very question which he poses to the messenger.

Either the oracle is true, or Leontes' knowledge is true— it must be one or the other. Leontes, though, made his decision before he ever broached the issue to Camillo. What he knows is truth; when faith contradicts knowledge, faith is wrong: "There is no truth at all i'th'oracle./ The sessions shall proceed."

Immediately, the error of his decision becomes apparent. Mamillius dies. Leontes sees his mistake: "Apollo's angry,, and the heavens themselves/ Do strike at my injustice." His repentance, however, comes too late, and Hermione also appears to die.

For his "great profaneness" Leontes vows perpetual penance.

The "profaneness" of which he is guilty is putting his own human means before divine means. He has trusted his own frail and unreliable knowledge rather than holding to the divine quality of faith. For human knowledge, no matter how certain it may seem, is always vain and uncertain; by putting trust in his knowledge, man achieves only misery. Faith in man, in goodness, in the gods and providence is the key to wisdom. 73

When the scene closes upon the chastened and penitant Leontes, the play has nearly completed its skeptical rejection of human know­ ledge, for Leontes has fully demonstrated the folly of relying upon sensory and rational understanding. There is, however, one more scene left before the skeptical argument has been completed. An- tigonus, the only other character to trust in the validity of know­ ledge, must also be disposed of. As he seeks a place on the Bohemian seacoast to deposit Perdita, he raises the issue of faith and know** ledge. "I have heard, but not believed, the spirits o'th'dead/ May walk again" (111.iii.15-16). Antigonus trusts his own knowledge of things which can be seen and felt with his own senses; he puts little faith in anything not to be known. He has seen the ghost of

Hermione, however, and he now knows that spirits can visit people.

He also trusts his reason, for he deduces from his visitation that

Hermione, in fact, was an adulteress and wants the child left in

Bohemia because her father was Polixenes. Like Leontes, Antigonus knows Hermione guilty. His senses and his reason tell him as much, and he will not cling to faith in the face of knowledge. Like Leontes he must suffer for his mistake, and he ends the scene by serving as a meal for a hungry bear. Having rejected faith in favor of his own vain knowledge, he must reach a tragic end.

The rest of the play is a fideistic assertion of the importance of faith. From the moment Antigonus flees before the bear, divine providence begins to re-weave the broken fabric of human happiness.

The whole point of human action in the second half of the drama is to show that providence will bring even the worst of human evils to 74 good conclusions if only men will have faith.

The appearance of the Shepherd announces a change. At first,, he, too, assumes the infant Perdita to be a bastard: "This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work" (ill.iii.71-2).

Rather than cast her out, though, the old man picks her up. Directly after addressing a modest prayer to the gods who watch over shepherds v

("Good luck, an't be thy will"), he finds the child, and in direct contrast to the old man who has just abandoned her, the Shepherd regards her as a piece of good luck. His closing lines ring with a peculiar reversal of tone when compared with the words of the old courtier who began the scene: "*Tis a lucky day, boy, and we’ll do good deeds on’t." The whole play, in fact, has reversed itself in this one scene. It has moved from the effects of human direction— bastardy, abandonment, death— to the effects of divine direction.

To clarify the issue even more, the fourth act opens with the speech of that peculiar character, Time, the Chorus. His appearance is intended to be reassuring; his purpose is to announce that all will be well, for he is, as Inga-Stina Ewbank has argued, "Time the 28 father of Truth." He is an allegory of time’s ability to bring all things to light, bothto reward the good and condemn the guilty.

His first lines state as much: "I that please some, try all, both joy and terror/ Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error ..."

(lV.i.1-2). He is, in fact, a function of providence. His purpose in the world of the play is to make sure that error be uncovered and goodness rewarded, and he exists solely because the guiding

28"The Triumph of Time in ’The Winter’s Tale’," REL, Apr., 1964, 83-100. 75 power in the universe is good. His relation to Stoic concepts of for­ tune, destiny, and providence is very important, and his sole dramatic function is to establish definitely that all the events in the play, being under his control, are for the ultimate,though unknowable, good.

After Polixenes and Camillo affirm providential control by announcing Prince Florizel's affection for Perdita, the play returns to the faith-knowledge theme. Autolycus enters. He is a light-hearted parallel to Leontes, for he is a character who lives by his wits and his senses while "for the life to come," he prefers to "sleep out the thought of it" (IV.iii.29-30). Like Leontes, he has gained only misery and terror by abandoning himself to his own knowledge.

His life is harsh and barren in comparison to the simple, trusting, but happy life of the Clown and Shepherd whom he repeatedly fleeces.

Hardly tragic, he is yet a sad sort of figure, for he refuses to hold those very qualities of faith and trust which are alone capable of bringing happiness.

In the long fourth scene, however, we return to the faith and knowledge conflict in earnest, but here the situation reverses that of the play's first half. Attention focuses upon a character clinging to his faith in spite of all that he knows. Florizel exactly reverses

Leontes as he cleaves to his faith in Perdita and providence no matter how many people tell him that he should know better.

Florizel establishes his faith in the world's goodness even more quickly than Leontes displayed his knowledge of the worldls evils. He blesses the time when he met Perdita (IV.iii.14), and 76 when chided about wooing below himself he calls upon the gods for . his precedent (24-31). Yet, aware of the dubious nature of Jupiter's

affairs with mortals, he swears that his desires "Run not before mine honor, nor my lusts/ B u m hotter than my faith" (34-5),

Florizel's faith, however, must contend with several challengers

speaking for knowledge. About to betroth himself to Perdita he an­ nounces that if he had "force and knowledge/ More than was ever man's" he would not value them without Perdita's love (367-8). The disguised Polixenes, however, knows that his son should not marry a shepherdess, and he objects to the engagement:

Reason my son Should choose himself a wife, but as good reason The father, all whose joy is nothing else But fair posterity, would hold some counsel In such a business. (399-403)

Reason and knowledge, not faith, should guide a man's decisions, according to Polixenes. His son disagrees, and the result is the same

sort of impasse which developed in earlier acts. When faith confronts knowledge, there is no room for conversation at any level but shouting;

the King repeatedly urges Florizel to tell his father, and the

Prince repeatedly answers no.

When Polixenes finally resorts to his royal authority to block

the marriage, Perdita knows that all is over, and she next counsels

Florizel to do as he knows he should; "I'll queen it no inch farther/

But milk my ewes and weep," " . . . my dignity would last/ But till

'twere known" (431-2, 468-9).

Florizel, of course, is "nothing altered," and now Camillo advises him: "You know your father's temper." The Prince, however, 1 77

is adamant. Perdita's dignity "cannot fail but by/ The violation

of my faith" (469-70). Camillo again urges, "Be advised," but Flor­

izel responds, "I am, and by my fancy. If my reason/ Will thereto

be obedient, I have reason" (475-6). His faith and his fancy direct

him, and when reason and knowledge oppose them then reason and know­

ledge must be foregone. Just as Leonte's knowledge could not be

shaken by arguments for faith, neither can Florizel’s faith be shaken

by knowledge. The Prince will fulfill his vow for he "needs must

think it honesty" (480), just as Leontes persevered in his accusations when he knew that there was villainy.

Leontes' "knowledge" earlier perverted a providentially happy

situation and turned it into a tragedy. Polixenes' knowledge has

now perverted an almost miraculously happy situation, and only Flor­

izel's faith In Perdita, in honesty, and in the world can rectify

It. But his faith holds true, and with reason obedient to his fancy,

the Prince and his Princess embark for Sicilia.

The next scenes are a study in the ways of providence in bringing

eventual good from present evil. Time finally unfolds all the errors; ;■

he has tried all and has given Leontes penance for his error before

bringing joy to everyone when Perdlta's true Identity Is discovered.

In the frequently faulted off-stage recognition scene (V.il.) all

the expectations raised by Time, the Chorus, are fulfilled. Had the

recognitions taken place on-stage. In fact, the audience might well'

have assumed the play to be over since all the formal elements of

a comic conclusion would have been met. Recognitions would have been

made, reconciliations established, and a royal marriage prepared. The 78 recognition of Perdita, of course, is not the end of the play, for

The Winter's Tale is not simply a study in the ways of providence; the final scene must make a statement about faith in providence as well as about providence itself.

The last elements of the play return Leontes to the same point he occupied in the trial scene. He must, once again, choose between faith and knowledge, and upon his decision hangs the fate of both himself and Hermione. Providence has returned him his daughter, and it will return him his wife if only he has faith to accept her.

Paulina, the King's fierce challenger and spiritual mentor, plays both roles in the final scene. She alternately goads him and guides. She, of course, owns the statue of the Queen, and when she first displays it, the royal audience is struck dumb. Perdita first moves toward it, and Paulina warns her away. Leontes is deeply af­ fected by what he sees, and Paulina goads him by starting to draw the curtain:

Indeed, my lord. If I had thought the sight of my poor image Would thus have wrought you— for the stone is mine— I'Id not have showed it. (V.iii.56-9)

Leontes stops her from closing it off, and Paulina guides him to thinking Impossible thoughts: "No longer shall you gaze on't, lest your fancy/ May think anon it moves" (60-1). Leontes again stays her, and he picks up her impossible thoughts; "Would you not deem it breathed? and that those veins/ Did verily bear blood?" Again

Paulina tempts Leontes to give up the fancies which he knows impos­ sible, but even as she offers to draw the curtain she plants the 79 seeds of suggestion: "My lord's almost so far transported that/ He'll think anon it lives." Leontes, of course, keeps her from drawing the curtain, for he is about to see that faith in good things, no matter how impossible one knows them to be, is better than the sanest rationality. "No settled senses of the world can match/ The pleasure of that madness." Leontes, now certain that the statue breathes even though he knows it cannot, offers to kiss the statue, and Paulina again offers to close the curtain. Now, however, she is ready for the final test:

Either forbear. Quit presently the chapel, or resolve you For more amazement, (85-7)

Leontes assents, and Paulina warns him, "It is required/ You do awake your faith." Calling for music, she instructs the statue to arise, and Hermione descends to Leontes. As Hermione embraces Leontes,

Paulina comments:

That she is living Were it but told you, should be hooted at Like an old tale. (115-7)

It is impossible for Hermione to be alive; it is like an old tale which everyone knows to be untrue. Similarly, the courtiers who reported the recognition of Perdita said the affair was like an old tale. Yet the old tale was true because Florizel had faith, and in his second test Leontes has also had faith in something which he knew to be impossible. Faced again with a situation where he must choose to believe in something wonderfully good or to know something unpleasant, he has chosen to have faith. By doing so he has raised himself above himself. 80

Like Montaigne’s conclusion to the Apology f o r Raymond Sebond and .

Charron’s position in de la Sagesse, Shakespeare's final scene in

The Winter’s Tale is a statement that faith is the only way a man can raise himself above the folly and vanity inevitably his when he relies upon his own means, his own knowledge as a guide. The truth is that men create their tragedies when they think too much of them­ selves and too little of the gods who control the universe. Men achieve wisdom and almost miraculous happiness when they can learn to distrust themselves and place their faith in providence. CHAPTER III

THE STRUCTURE

Nothing more clearly demonstrates the nature of the Baroque

•'unified unity" in The Winter's Tale than does the structure. The structural pattern, as I hope to show in this chapter, aims at achiev­ ing that "union of parts in a single theme . . . by the subordination, to one unconditioned dominant, of all other elements" which is typ­ ically Baroque.^ The single theme which dominates the play, of course, is skeptical fideism, and the architectonic pattern unifying the work into an aesthetic whole derives its coherence from the logical arguments which underlie that central theme. The dramatic structure of the play, in fact, is reflective of the logical structure of the theme. In a manner typical of the Baroque impulse to unite a work around an all-encompassing idea, the play modifies and sacrifices independently conceived notions concerning dramatic structure and

"ideal dramatic form" in order to make this particular drama a vehicle for the expression of its special theme, skeptical fideism.

As a result, the structure seems obscure and ill-done when inter­ preted without reference to the central theme, and, indeed, many critics have commented adversely on the play’s design, especially

^oelfflin, Principles, p. 15.

81 82 2 the failure to present the recognition of Perdita on the stage.

Like most Baroque art, however, it has a structure which is delib­ erately "subjective" and responsive to its own particular thematic needs; it cannot be judged, only misjudged, when taken out of context and appraised in terms of "objective" criteria for a well-made play or for five-act structure.

The structure, however, is like the theme in that it is not simply a radical departure from Shakespeare’s earlier patterns but is rather a modification of tendencies appearing quite early in his career. As Davy A. Carozza, among others, has shown, the Baroque style depends upon the pre-existence of the Renaissance style for its most fundamental characteristics, and even when the two are contrasted the seventeenth century style retains much that it learned 3 from its sixteenth and fifteenth century precursors. Shakespeare, however, not only learned from masters of the Renaissance dramatic style; he was one. His early comedies are distinctly Renaissance, and his late. Baroque works retain much from the early style, par­ ticularly in structure. In the late plays, though, the impulse toward unified unity has evolved from the earlier impulse toward multiple unity, and the structural patterns have been modified and altered to suit the new direction. Woelfflin, again, offers the most useful

2 Quiller-Couch, Shakespeare’s Workmanship, pp. 254-70, sum­ marizes a long history of objections, running back to Dryden; his biggest objection is to the failure to present Perdita’s recognition, but he has many more.

^Davy A. Carozza, "For a Definition of Mannerism; The Hatzfeldian Thesis," Colloquia Germanica, 1 (1967), 66-77. 83 terminology for dealing with this issue. In its essence, the nature of the modification is to change the "closed form" of Shakespeare's early, Renaissance structures to a Baroque "open form" in a late play like The Winter's Tale.

In this chapter, then, I propose to do two things. First, I wish to show how The Winter's Tale utilizes the same basic structural pattern as is found in Shakespeare's early comedies. For the sake of consistency, I will focus mainly on Two Gentlemen of Verona as 4 a fairly typical example of the early plays. I will argue that the protasis-epitasis-catastrophe five-act formula, familiar from the studies of T. W. Baldwin, lies at the base of the structure 5 in both the early and the late plays. Second, I will contend that while Two Gentlemen of Verona pays careful heed to;, the prescriptions of the neo-classical pattern. The Winter's Tale uses the five-act form as a pattern upon which to work a series of consistent raod-

There are several other good reasons to use TGV. First, TGV and OT closely related in genre; Ristine, English Tragicomedy, p. 119, calls TGV and LLL the most notably tragicomic of Shakespeare's early plays. As romances, both TGV and LLL share some fundamental qualities with ^ and the tragicomic genre, even though they are called "comedies" in FI. Moreover, TGV and share very close textual histories. Both were first printed in FI, and both were probably printed from Ralph Crane's transcripts of the prompt-book used by the company. Such texts are generally conceded to be very sound, since they conform closely to the acting versions of the plays and are a close reflection of the plays as Shakespeare's com­ pany presented them and, thus, of the plays as Shakespeare finally approved them. The act and scene divisions, then, are almost certainly the work of Crane or of Shakespeare himself, not impositions upon the text by the Folio editors. As the company's scribe. Crane was familiar with Shakespearean methods, and it seems unlikely that his dividing the text into acts and scenes would have violated Shake­ speare's practice, even if it did not reflect it precisely. 5 Baldwin, Five-Act Structure. 84 iflcations. More specifically, I will maintain that Two Gentlemen and all the early comedies strive to achieve Renaissance multiple unity by striving for an ideal dramatic form and in aiming at this ideal they achieve a structural pattern typical of the closed form in Renaissance art. The Winter's Tale, however, modifies the formula to make the play achieve Baroque unified unity, and in so doing the play assumes a structure typical of the Baroque open form. In essence

I mean to say that an early work like Two Gentlemen of Verona attempts to give particular expression to an ideal dramatic form which pre­ cedes and transcends the individual play. Expressed and analyzed in the Renaissance commentaries on the five-act formula of classical and neo-classical comedy, this abstract, ideal dramatic form provides the obvious and artistically pleasing design which unites the inde­ pendently interesting elements of the drama into an aesthetic whole.

The net effect, then, of the play's careful attempt to achieve the ideal dramatic form is to give the play a type of Renaissance multiple unity and to achieve the artificiality, balance, and limitation typical of Renaissance closed form structure. In contrast. The Winter's

Tale modifies the ideal form to make it yield a more perfect expression for the particular theme of skeptical fideism, and in favoring the particular, subjective needs of the individual theme over the uni­ versal, objective requirements for dramatic structure, the play arrives at the Baroque unified unity which leads to the inartificial, unstably balanced, unlimited structural effects of the open form.

The first thing to do, then, is establish that The Winter's Tale 85

largely conforms to the five-act structural pattern which informs the

early comedies. As T, W. Baldwin’s Shakspere’s Five-Act Structure has

amply demonstrated, the sixteenth century had a carefully elaborated

theory concerning dramatic structure, especially comic structure.

Stretching back to medieval commentary on the Latin drama, a whole

tradition, and quite a full one, of commentary surrounded both the

study and the teaching of classical drama during the Renaissance.

This critical tradition was basically rhetorical, and it centered

around Terence, the school favorite, much as theories concerning

rhetoric and prose style focused upon Cicero. Basically, this set

of prescriptions for achieving and recognizing the ideal dramatic

form emphasized the Aristotelian need for a clear beginning, middle,

and end. The first two acts were to constitute a protasis or beginning

of the action by introducing main characters and setting the situation

for later complications in the plot. The third and fourth acts were

to be an epitasis or winding up of the plot to its fullest complexity

through disguise, mistaken identity, and so on. The final act was

to end the drama with a comic catastrophe which turned all the misdirected plot lines into the proper paths for a happy outcome, but some theories also included a summa epitasis or moment of supreme

complication and comic tension directly before the catastrophe as

a part of the last act. Obviously, such a theory of dramatic structure

is in some degree universal; it is the basis for the whole idea of

the "well-made play," and much drama since the Renaissance fits at

least loosely into the formula of protasis-epitasis-catastrophe. As

Baldwin has shown, of course, the theory most fully applies to Shake­ 86

speare’s practice in such early comedies as Two Gentlemen of Verona,

and it also lies at the foundation of the structure in The Winter's

Tale.

In both Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Winter's Tale the

first two acts constitute the protasis. These acts reveal the comic

situation and introduce the first plot complications. The first act

sets up the basic problem from which the rest of the play develops.

In Two Gentlemen Act One closes when Proteus, having won Julia’s

love, learns he must join Valentine at Milan; the separation from

Julia and forced reunion with Valentine are the plot elements from which the rest of the story grows. In Act One of The Winter's Tale

the same pattern prevails. Leontes conceives his jealous passion, and Camillo flees to Bohemia with Polixenes;the two major plot lines are thus established. Act Two completes the protasis by .initiating

the problems and plot complications to be developed later in the play. The second act of Two Gentlemen introduces nascent plot com­ plexities by revealing Valentine's love for Silvia, his plan for

elopement, Proteus' passion for Silvia, Julia's search for Proteus, and Proteus' epitasis-producing decision to betray his friend.

In The Winter's Tale Act Two begins the plot complications by having

Leontes imprison Hermione, banish Perdita, send to the oracle, and decide to give Hermione the climactic public trial. In both plays,

then, the close of Act Two signals the end of the protasis; the basic complications have been introduced (Proteus has fallen in love with

Silvia; and Leontes has banished Perdita) and the decisions leading to the further complexities of the epitasis have been made (Proteus 87

will betray Valentine, and Leontes will try Hermione).

Acts Three and Four develop the epitasis. They increase the

complexities to their full tension, and they set up the situation

'“’for the final comic catastrophe of Act Five. In both plays the third

act begins the epitasis by executing the decisions made at the close

of Act Two. Proteus betrays Valentine, thus exiling his friend to the

forest; Leontes tries Hermione, thus killing Mamillius and condemning

Hermione to the limbo of apparent death. His betrayal completed,

Proteus begins laying his plans to win Silvia; Leontes, with the

trial completed, begins his efforts to expiate his sin through penance.

Act Four completes the epitasis by bringing the plot to its fullest

complexity. In Two Gentlemen the plot lines become fully enmeshed

as Valentine joins the forest bandits, Proteus retains the services of

the disguised Julia, and Silvia decides to flee in pursuit of Valen­

tine. In The Winter's Tale, too. Act Four fully complicates the

plot. Florizel and Perdita, thwarted in their betrothal, decide to

flee to Leontes. The Clown and Shepherd are duped into accompanying

them while Camillo and Polixenes get ready to follow. Act Four,

however, also prepares for the happy resolution of the play as it

complicates matters. In both plays. Act Four closes with characters

fleeing toward a final confrontation and recognition scene in which

the truth will be revealed and conflicts be allayed as the major

figures all come together. In the earlier play the key to the happy

resolution lies in the presence of the disguised Julia as she accom­

panies Proteus. In the later play the comic catastrophe depends upon

the accidental inclusion of the Clown and Shepherd among the Prince's 88 party.

The final acts of both plays contain the comic catastrophe which converts the story from conflict and tension to reconciliation and union. In Two Gentlemen the summa epitasis is achieved as Proteus, having rescued Silvia from the bandits, prepares to rape her. Valentine enters; he confronts Proteus with his villainy, and Proteus repents.

The catastrophe having begun, Julia faints and identifies herself.

The Duke, having pursued Silvia, is brought in, and he pardons all the bandits and sanctions the marriages of the two pairs of lovers. The play ends with disguised characters revealed, broken friendships healed, sundered families reunited, separated lovers married, and political enmities allayed. Similarly, in the final act of The Winter’s Tale the summa epitasis is reached when Polixenes arrives in Sicilia and the royal love affair seems hopelessly dashed.

The Shepherd's revelation of Perdita's true identity, however, saves the situation and converts the confrontation into a reconciliation and reunion. The old friendship between Leontes and Polixenes is rekindled and bound even closer by a betrothal. The disguised Perdita is recognized, and in the last scene Hermione also reveals herself,

Leontes' broken family is reunited, and so also is Polixenes'. Sep­ arated lovers are married and remarried as Florizel joins Perdita,

Camillo joins Paulina, and Leontes rejoins Hermione. Political dif­ ferences are settled as the feuding houses of Bohemia and Sicilia join together and exiled characters like Camillo return home. Thus, with the five-act formula fulfilled, the plays end in the traditional comic manner as the central characters troop off the stage to a 89 wedding.

Yet, despite the obvious and important structural similarities.

Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Winter's Tale remain very different kinds of play. They have contrasting features which are at least as

important as any of the features which seem to identify them. In particular, there are three categories of formal variance which sep­ arate the plays. The earlier work is delightfully "artificial" in all the best senses of the Renaissance usage of that term; the later work is deliberately inartificial. Two Gentlemen is neatly and sym­ metrically balanced in its structural design; The Winter's Tale

is carefully asymmetrical and unstable in its balance. And Two

Gentlemen confines itself within a clearly recognized set of structural limits; The Winter's Tale recognizes the traditional limits of dra­ matic form only insofar as it can gain dramatic effect by exceeding

the obvious boundaries. These three classifications of formal dif­ ference constitute the defining traits of Renaissance closed form and Baroque open form; they derive from the plays' various impulses toward multiple and unified unity. As we shall see, all three types of difference proceed from the difference between the way Two Gentlemen accepts the five-act formula as an ideal form to be captured by scrupulous adherence to the rules and the way The Winter's Tale utilizes the formula as a basic design to be molded and fitted to the

task of expressing the skeptical fideist theme.

The first major distinction between the Renaissance closed form of Two Gentlemen of Verona and the Baroque open form of The

Winter's Tale can be seen in the degree of artificiality in the 90 plays' structures. Woelfflin's Principles of Art History provides a useful analogy to help elucidate the distinction between artificial and inartificial. Attempting to define the key difference between patterns of composition in Renaissance and Baroque painting, Woelf­ flin decides that "the final question is . . . whether the figure, the total picture as a visible form, looks intentional or not."^

The italics in this passage are Woelfflin's, but they are useful for our purposes, too. The word "intentional" in this context is exactly synonymous with the Renaissance term "artificial." Both words refer to the clarity with which an art work reveals the presence of the artist's control over his subject; both terras relate to the way a Renaissance painter or poet deliberately controls the form of his work in order to create an effect: which cannot be accidental or natural and which must reveal the artist's ability to correct and perfect the materials of the extra-aesthetic universe when he uses them in his creations. Clearly, such a concept is part of the "mirror up to nature" idea of art, for the whole purpose of an artificial or intentional effect in art is to reveal the artist’s power to correct and improve the wild imperfections of uncivilized nature when he sets about to reflect the universe in the perfecting glass of his art. Conversely, an inartificial or unintentional effect is achieved by deliberately concealing the artist's control over his material and allowing the form of a work to seem uncontrolled, acci­ dental, and directly responsive only to the patterns of the natural universe rather than to any orderly design imposed upon the material

^Woelfflin, Principles, p. 126. 91 by the artist.

To illustrate his point, Woelfflin uses details from two ' ‘ : sketches, one by Durer and one by Rembrandt. In Durer's Renaissance style the foliage of tree-leaves and leaf-groupings is represented by lines. In Rembrandt’s Baroque style, however, leaf groups appear only as dark splotches, not lines. Moreover, there is a significant difference in the nature of the two artists’ control over the rhythm •

II guiding the distribution of foliage. Durer maintains careful control over distribution. He not only represents the leaf-patches, he also explains how they relate to each other and to the tree. Each grouping is connected to the tree by a carefully rendered limb, or it is connected by intervening groups of leaves and branches. There is an explanation for how and why every individual patch of foliage comes to be in its own location. Obviously, the artist is exercising careful control over the form of his drawing by including the causes for every individual element,.Rembrandt, on the other hand, simply blocks in groups of leaves. Undoubtedly, they appear where the artist wants, but he makes no attempt to explain or control the rhythm of their occurrence. There is no evidence of Rembrandt’s hand controlling their distribution, and the resulting form appears fortuitous rather than artificial or intentional.

The contrast can be traced in elements other than foliage, but the point is clear. In Renaissance works the parts of the picture or statue or play are distributed according to a controlled, clearly represented pattern; part of the pleasure in beholding them is to perceive the artificial pattern by which the artist unites the parts 92 into a whole. In the Baroque style the pattern uniting the separate parts and controlling their distribution is blurred and unclear; the audience cannot perceive the pattern immediately, and the work creates an impression of free and accidental unifying rhythm.

This kind of contrast between Renaissance artificiality and

Baroque inartificiality is part of the difference between Two Gentle­ men of Verona and The Winter's Tale. In the earlier play, the struc­ tural divisions of the five-act formula are maintained with absolute clarity, and the causality relating each division to the next is revealed explicitly. In the later play the division between structural units is blurred as they overlap each other and merge together. In all of the early comedies, in fact, act divisions occur in strict response to clearly defined narrative stages. In Two Gentlemen

Act One closes with Proteus* recapitulating the cause of his being ordered to Milan and exiting to begin his trip. Act Two closes with

Julia departing on her journey. Act Three closes with Valentine leaving the city and Proteus beginning his siege of Silvia. Act

Four ends with Silvia preparing to leave Milan in pursuit of Valentine.

And Act Five closes with comic catastrophe in the forest. The com­ pletion of each journey marks the obvious beginning for a new stage in the plot's complication; the exiting of a major character to begin a journey obviously closes one level of the narrative. Much of the play's delightful quality resides in the neatness -.vhith which each act closes a narrative strand; how could there be a clearer break than to leave? Yet, as each element of the structure seals itself off from the next, it also reveals the causal relationship between 93 itself and the ensuing act by sending a major character to the locus of the next incidents. The play, ends with comic catastrophe as the final scene draws together all the plot strands and all the characters in a single reunion. It is the almost inevitable conclusion which could be predicted as the logical outcome of events portrayed in Act Four.

The whole plot develops in neatly symmetrical progression from one individual structural unit to the next. The whole is clearly unified by the pattern which the dramatist carefully reveals, even as he develops each individual part.

In The Winter's Tale, however, this kind of artificiality has disappeared. The clear distinction between structural units has become blurred, and causality, linking each one to the next is not immediately apparent. The effect of such merging is to make the play seem unintentional and inartificial.

The clearest instance of The Winter's Tale's blending together of separate narrative stages within major formal divisions occurs at the transition from Act Three to Act Four. The design of Two

Gentlemen's third act indicates the likelihood of finding Act Three to include scenes following the climactic moments of the trial. In

Two Gentlemen Valentine's climactic betrayal and banishment are followed by scenes which complete some loose strands in the plot before the third act closes (i.e., the scene where Proteus takes charge of Thurio's wooing of Silvia). So we need not be surprised to find that Act Three of The Winter's Tale completes the third narrative stage by both depositing Perdita on the Bohemian seacoast and disposing of Antigonus (and, thus, the secret of the child's 94 location) before concluding. What we cannot expect to find in Act

Three is a full-fledged introduction into the pastoral world of the

Bohemian coast. In Two Gentlemen the characters of the Mantuan forest do not appear until IV.i, because they belong to the fourth, not the third, narrative level. Similarly, the Clown and Shepherd are charac­ ters of the fourth plot stage in The Winter's Tale, but they appear in Act Three and have an extensive dialogue. They reveal Perdita to be not merely launched upon her journey but finished with it.

The fourth narrative stage has already begun when the Shepherd decides to adopt her, but the third structural division is not yet finished.

The blurred division between Acts Three and Four is muddled still further by the appearance of Time, the Chorus at the outset of Act

Four. In fact, the appearance of Time is an interpolation; belonging to no particular stage in the plot, yet serving an important nar­ rative function, it can as well be justified as an interlude between the acts or a final feature of Act Three as an opening for Act Four.^

Ultimately, no matter what its purpose may have been, its effect is to obscure the exact nature of the formal division between Acts

Three and Four. First the appearance of the Clown and Shepherd,,then the speech by Time cloud the nature of the structural division be­ tween Acts Three and Four until the separation between the two seems logically and causally unaccountable. The division serves a definite narrative purpose, but in terms of the five-act formula

In their editions of Shakespeare both Theobald and Warburton tried placing IV.i. as both a final scene of Act Three and an inter­ lude between III and IV. 95 it seems uncontrolled and accidental. Compared to the neat, clean breaks at the close of each act in Two Gentlemen of Verona, this kind of act division appears unintentional and inartificial.

In a lesser way the division between Acts Two and Three also has an accidental, uncontrolled quality when compared to the corresponding section of Two Gentléaen»> In the earlier play, the only scene separating Proteus' decision to betray Valentine (II, . vi,) and his execution of that plan is the one in which Julia decides to leave for Milan (ll,vii,). Almost the first event in Act Three is Proteus* revelation to the Duke, In The Winter's Tale, though, the opening scene of Act Three presents Dion's conversation with Cleo- menes. Serving the clear dramatic purpose of uniting it with the central scene of Act Three, Hermione's trial, this dialogue serves to stress the solemnity of the prophecy and put the audience in anticipation of learning its contents. This scene, however, clearly belongs to the narrative stage of Act Two, Dion and Cleomenes do not ad­ vance the plot at all. Their arrival has already been announced in the last scene of Act Two, and their appearance merely reemphasizes one of the narrative events of the plot's second stage. Their apr pearance in Act Three counteracts and obscures the formal or ar­ tificial pattern of division between Acts Two and Three by carrying one stage of the narrative into the next structural division. Thus, the relationship between the parts of the play is controlled by a pattern or rhythm which differs from the artificial pattern of struc­ tural division found in the earlier plays. This lapping over of nar­ rative stages from one act into another is an indication of the free. 96 open. Baroque form of The Winter*s Tale.

The type of balance maintained between the architectonic units forms the second major area of difference between the early plays and The Winter's Tale. In Two Gentlemen of Verona the careful main­ tenance of the separation between acts aids in achieving a neatly symmetrical balance between the five acts of the protasis-epitasis- catastrophe formula. In The Winter's Tale the merging and blending of structural units is a primary method by which the play modifies the five-act formula to achieve an asymmetrical and unstable type of balance between the divisions.

In the Renaissance closed form of the earlier play, each act makes a single, definite contribution to the whole play by adding one more stage to the progress of the narrative. Dramatic tension develops in a series of discrete steps, and each step is both depen­ dent upon the previous and preparatory for the following. Thus, no act is more important than any other, for each one depends upon the others; the epitasis of Acts Three and Four cannot exist without the protasis of Acts One and Two for the simple reason that the protasis establishes all the plot lines forming the necessary pre­ conditions for the situation of the epitasis. Within the epitasis, moreover, the fourth act cannot exist without the preceding third act, while the third act cannot be any more than a fragment when separated from Act Four. The effect of such a carefully contrived dependence among the separate elements of the structure is to give the play an extraordinarily symmetrical balance in its fundamental design. Removing or altering any act is inconceivable, not because 97

any of the acts is extremely well-done but because the construction of the whole is so intricately balanced that any alteration of a

single part would destroy the whole pattern. Ultimately, much of the delight to be taken in a work like Two Gentlemen derives from the pleasure of observing this perilous balancing of conflicts and com­ plications in such a way that so long as each plot line takes just the turns it does, and when it does, the whole work comes out at precisely the point where comic catastrophe is possible. Any change

in events or in order of events would mean that the summa epitasis would close the action with some tragic event. The dramatist, though, has controlled events and organized the structural pattern in just the right way to allow events to rest on that one center of balance, the comic catastrophe, which will guarantee a happy outcome and which, on the other hand, could not be achieved unless the writer were carefully balancing the separate elements of his design in the right harmony from the very start of the work.

This is the kind of balance which the Renaissance commentators and theorists had in mind when they formulated the concepts of the five-act structural ideal. In The Winter's Tale, however, Shakespeare modified the ideal in the direction of another sort of balance. In this play he builds toward the conclusion not by progressively tightening the tension through a series of discrete steps, each of which increases tension by adding one more step to the plot complex­ ities, but by very quickly bringing tension to a great height, then just as rapidly lowering it before building it up once again. In the Baroque, open form of this late work, some structural elements 98 are more important than others, and structural units balance each other less by a process of logical and causal dependence than by countering brief, intense, densely dramatic moments against long, low-key scenes where conflict is at a minimum. Where Two Gentlemen

is composed of five totally dependent divisions, The Winter's Tale is split into two clearly defined halves, each of which is very nearly an independent play of its own. The first half of the work is a full blown tragedy which includes the death of a prince and the apparent death of a queen. The second half of the play (from the middle of Ill.iii. onward) is a comedy, and much of it a pastoral comedy of clowns and shepherds. It is from this kind of clear-cut bifurcation that the merging and blurring of structural divisions derives its importance, for it is by blending Act Three and Four

into an indistinct continuum that the play merges the two halves

into a single design. Moreover, some parts of this design are dis­ tinctly more significant than others. The trial of Act Three raises

tension to a height not again achieved until the last scene of the play, and the confrontation with Paulina and banishment of Perdita in

Act Two is another scene of crucial importance. Yet most of Act

Four, an act nearly as long as the entirety of the first three, could be compressed or deleted without material effect on the plot.

Act Four does not pick up dramatic tension where Act Three leaves off; to the contrary, it deliberately lowers the extreme stress of

the trial scene and converts it to the low level of pastoral’tragi­ comedy and even, in Autolycus* relations with the shepherds and shepherdesses, farce. Act Four contributes to the plot, and it develops 99 the epitasis, but it does so at far greater length than it really needed, and it does so by lowering, then slowly raising, the level of dramatic tension rather than simply adding a progressive next-step to the plot complexities. Perhaps more significant than anything else, there is the nature of the comic catastrophe in The Winter's

Tale. In an early play like Two Gentlemen of Verona the catastrophic turn in Act Five is a fully integrated element in the design of the whole* It has a clear causal relationship to the rest of the play; the audience knows why for the first time all the major characters are together in the forest; we have known why since the end of Act •

Four, and with that knowledge we have been expecting some sort of confrontation since the ending of the epitasis* Why else would the dramatist send all four major characters to the same location? The

Winter's Tale contains a similar recognition scene in Act Five; the audience has been waiting for Leontes to discover Perdita*s true identity since the close of the fourth act. But this scene is part of the comic catastrophe. In fact, this extamely important element of the five-act formula does not even take place on stage; it is merely reported to the audience by some gentlemen who accidentally witness it.

The real center of the catastrophe comes in the third scene of the fifth act with the restoration of Hermione. Only then are all the major characters included in the happy conclusion. The play, in other words, alters the neo-classical pattern by stretching the catastrophe

Into two events and by consigning much of the action to an off-stage position. Moreover, that part of the catastrophe which takes place in the audience's view is the part with the least obvious sort of 100

causal relationship to the rest of the play. The nature of the balance between catastrophe and epitasis has been modified, then, because the section of the catastrophe which the audience actually witnesses comes as a surprise. It takes place after the primary

expectations and tensions aroused by the epitasis have been allayed,

and it, thus, gains an impact different from anything to be achieved by the usual working of comic denouement. Its net effect is to mag­ nify the importance of the final element of the plot by raising it

from the level of causality which normally links segment to segment within the five-act formula and by placing the catastrophe on a dif­

ferent level of complexity from anything else in the plot. Balance, of course, is maintained, but it is maintained by de-emphasizing

the logic which normally links catastrophe to epitasis (by placing

the recognition scene off the stage) and concomitantly emphasizing

the less apparent causation which makes Hermione's revival an ap­ propriate part of the catastrophe. The balance between catastrophe

and protasis-epitasis comes about not by utilization of a single, central scene in which all the plot lines mesh together and resolve

themselves, but rather by the use of two scenes, one of which ties

together most of the plot strands with minimal dramatic effect, the other of which closes a single loose end with maximum theatrical

impact. The result is a highly unstable kind of Baroque equilibrium

in The Winter's Tale which contrasts sharply with the neatly sym­ metrical balance found in the closed form of Renaissance plays like

Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Probably the most startlingly Baroque qualities of The Winter's 101

Tale, however, derive less from the structural balance than from the way the play’s structure exceeds the formal limitations implicit

in Renaissance dramatic theory. Within the closed form of a Renais­

sance play like Two Gentlemen of Verona the limits imposed by the

five-act formula are all-important. The play accepts and re-inforces

the idea that a drama must begin with a clearly defined protasis,

develop a clear middle section in the epitasis, and close with a con­

clusive ending in the catastrophe. Ultimately Aristotelian in nature,

the neo-classical idea underlying the structure in such a play is that

there is a transcendent, ideal form for drama to assume. The merit

of a play, then, can be assessed in terms of how perfectly it actu­

alizes that ideal form, and the function of the dramatist is to make

his play realize a form giving complete, concrete, particular ex­

pression to the generalized abstract ideal. That ideal form is stat-ed'

.49' analyzed in the five-act formula with its insistence that

the ideal dramatic form has sharply defined limits; it has an immedi­

ately recognizable beginning, a definite middle, and a clear end. It

is self-contained and, more importantly, totally distinct from any­

thing else; its conclusion ties up all the loose ends in such a

way that they can go no farther, and its beginning generates plot lines

and conflicts which have no existence before the events of the pro­

tasis. The formal beauty in a play like Two Gentlemen, then, lies

in the thoroughness with which it contains itself within the ideal

formal limitations, and the audience's pleasure lies in observing

the degree to which the artist has been able to give particular

expression to the ideal form by remaining strictly within its bound- 102 daries. With these providing the criteria for judgment, a play like

Two Gentlemen of Verona must not only start from a single, clearly defined point and end at an equally clear, single moment, it must also establish an absolutely distinct division between beginning and middle, middle and end. The whole work must conform as strictly as possible to the ideal form, and the way to achieve that conformity is to ob­ serve the limitations and boundaries of the various structural units

(beginning, middle, and end) as strictly as possible. As we have already seen, the artificiality of Two Gentlemen comes from precisely such care in observing the boundaries between structural divisions. So far as the play can pretend to greatness, it achieves greatness from the way in which it not only accepts the limits of the five-act ideal but even reinforces the limits by giving each act its own clearly recognizable beginning and even more obvious conclusion. It is pre­ cisely this cognizance of limits and of the necessity to work within ideal bounds which gives the closed form of Renaissance drama its distinctively artificial beauty.

A Baroque play like The Winter's Tale, however, depends for much of its power on the way it deliberately exceeds the limits of its form. We have already observed some of the ways the play oblit­ erates the artificial structural distinctions so important to the

Renaissance aesthetic. There are, however, two other important methods, by which it exceeds the limits. In the last scene the play carries on beyond the orthodox catastrophe and, thus, denies the injunction concerning an unequivocal finish, and in the trial scene it distorts the idea of a clearly developed middle. 103

From one point of view, of course, the whole of The Winter's

Tale can be seen as a perversion of the familiar Medieval and Ren­ aissance dictum that comedy begins in sadness and ends in happiness; the whole play simply extends the idea of sadness to a degree which

Renaissance comedians considered unacceptable and then does the same thing with the idea of happiness,. Implicit in the Renaissance theorists' thumbnail definition of comedy was the idea that sadness should not assume the proportions of tragic sadness, and they guarded against this possibility whenever they undertook extensive commentary on the nature of comedy; comic sadness could not become tragic so long as comedy was limited to dealing with lower-class characters, for instance. In The Winter's Tale, though, Shakespeare distorts the idea of the comic epitasis by extending the unhappy plot complexities to the level of tragedy. The death of Mamillius in Act Three, Scene g Two is a tragic event, and there is no escaping that truth. The trial of Hermione is the immediate cause of his death, and it is the reason for Hermiones' apparent death as well. Yet this scene (lll.ii.) is really no more than a single step, albeit a climactic step, in the development of the epitasis. It is a step which distorts the whole idea of the epitasis as the comic theorists had formulated the concept; it is a step which extends the idea of a clear middle into a level of dramatic tension and plot complexity clearly beyond anything intended by the formulators of the five-act theory, but it is still in its essence no more than one step in the progress of the

g This point is emphasized by Robert Grams Hunter in Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1965), pp. 185-203. 104 epitasis.

Similarly, the catastrophe exceeds the normal limits. In the first place, its splitting of the comic catastrophe into two scenes negates the Renaissance ideal of an obvious, well-defined ending. The off-stage recog.nltion scene seems to be the end of the play; nd audience can actually expect the play to continue once Perdita is known, for there seem to be no more major plot lines unresolved, yet the play continues. Just at the point where the conclusion appears to be fully developed, the play adds its most important scene. It deliberately reserves its most important scene. It reserves its most dramatic moments for a position outside the normal. Renais­ sance boundaries, and it gives extra impact to the final scene by the careful positioning of the final moments outside the predictable limits of the dramatic form. Refusing to be confined with the ar­ bitrary bounds of an imposed "ideal," the play goes beyond the limits.

Adding a catastrophe to the ideal catastrophe, the play distorts the ideal form by injecting a particular, subjective element into the structure. By thus rendering the conclusion uncertain and unpredict­ able, it negates the Renaissance ideal of self-containment and self- sufficiency while affirming the Baroque ideal of continuity between the art-work and the world outside the work. In a work like The

Winter's Tale, where one apparent ending turns out to be apparent only, there must always be some ambiguity as the reality of any conclusion. The old limits have been penetrated, and any new limits must inevitably seem arbitrary and accidental. Hermione having returned, an event clearly beyond the limit normally imposed by the 105 comic catastrophe, why should we not expect yet another scene in which Mamillius reappears, or Antigonus?

The structure of The Winter's Tale, then, is a modified version of the Renaissance structural ideal. It utilizes the protasis-epitasis- catastrophe pattern familiar from earlier works like Two Gentlemen of Verona, but it alters that formula to meet its own unique aims.

In particular it strives for an unintentional or inartificial effect different from the Renaissance ideal. It strikes a different, less stable balance among its parts by balancing densely dramatic moments against long scenes where dramatic tension is dissipated while the earlier play balances scenes of equal dramatic density against each other in a stable, obvious design. It deliberately penetrates beyond the limits explicitly recognized by earlier drama. The net effect is to make The Winter's Tale a play with a Baroque, open form and Two

Gentlemen of Verona a play with a Renaissance, closed form.

Ultimately, however, the differences which distinguish the closed from the open form all go back to the primary difference between the desire for multiple unity and the impulse toward unified unity.

In direct contrast to Two Gentlemen of Verona, a play in which the five-act formula is basic to the unity of the whole work. The Winter's

Tale does not depend upon the audience's recognition of the neo-clas­ sical pattern for its unity. In fact, the play obscures the presence of the formula in many ways, as we have seen. Skeptical fideism, the play's central theme, is the real key to the formal structure of the play, and the protasis-epitasis-catastrophe pattern is important only insofar as it provides a basic set of directions to be adapted 106 to the needs of this particular theme.

The play's primary structural pattern is far more responsive to the inferential logic of the fideistic philosophical arguments than to the causal and syllogistic logic of the five-act form. Act One develops the irreconcilable antithesis between faith and knowledge;

Leontes must choose to rely upon one or the other. Either his faith in Hermione is correct, or his knowledge of her adultery is correct; there is no mediating ground between faith and knowledge, and there is no escaping the need to choose one or the other. Leontes chooses knowledge in the second scene of the play, and the rest of the play's first half, to the middle of Act Three, pursues the conse­ quences of his erroneous decision. The trial scene comes in the very center of the play, the middle scene of the middle act, and it brings the concluding proof that knowledge cannot be trusted. The logic of the play's argument, then, has been a pattern of direct inference.

The opening scenes of the play present the proposition "Either A (know­ ledge) or B (faith)," and the first half of the play presents the argument "Not A," i.e., "not knowledge." The first half is essentially skeptical, in other words.

The second half of the play advances the conclusion "thus B;" that is to say, the second half of the play is essentially fideistic.

Chapter Two, again, provides the evidence for that assertion. Clearly, the play's structure reflects this essential logic of the skeptical fideists. It splits in two at the middle; one half explores the in­ validity of one possibility, and the other half is devoted to ex­ plaining the validity of the other. The play has two scenes of cli- 107 mactic tension. The first occurs when the skeptical arguments against knowledge are proven correct; the second occurs when Hermione*s reappearance proves the truth of the fideist arguments. The play moves from extreme sadness resulting from a tragically wrong choice to extreme happiness resulting from a right choice. The play shifts at the middle from a set of characters who demonstrate the nature of one choice to a set of new characters who begin to demonstrate the meaning of the alternative. The logic motivating this extraordinary reversal in the structure is the shift from skepticism to fideism in the theme.

The logical argument of the central theme having become the prime determinant in the play’s structure, The Winter’s Tale modifies the protasis-epitasis-catastrophe formula to allow the argument to develop along its own lines. It alters the balance among the acts in order to emphasize the inferential logic of the theme rather than the syllogistic logical progression of the five-act form. It violates the traditional limits on dramatic form in order to give formal and dramatic dominance to those two scenes most crucial to the develop­ ment of the theme. In other words, as I will demonstrate in more detail, the play achieves a Baroque open form by attempting to make its structure perfectly and completely expressive of the skeptical fideist theme; it arrives at a Baroque open form by striving after

Baroque unified unity.

In a play like Two Gentlemen of Verona the five-act formula must be clearly and artificially revealed because it provides the ■ design uniting a group of separately conceived units. In The Winter’s 108

Tale, however, the work is not executed as five separate parts but rather as a single logical argument. Act divisions, thus, seem to be accidental interruptions in a single flow. The playwright need not manifest his controlling hand directing the design which unifies the parts. To the contrary, he must obscure his artifice and let the work seem a contiguous, single unit broken only by the dictates of nature, such as time. Thus, the logical break separating the first from the second half of The Winter's Tale does not signal the close of an act. Instead, it comes in the middle of an act, and that act is carefully merged into the narrative level of the next to emphasize the continuity of the theme. The switch from skeptical rebuttals of knowledge to fideistic affirmations of faith is, within the either-or context of the play's logic, continuous. The moment when knowledge is finally proved unreliable is the very moment which, logically, signals the proof that faith is reliable. To guarantee that the two halves appear in their dramatic form as the logically inseparable continuity which they are, the shift is placed in the middle of an act and, in fact, in the middle of a scene. During the trial scene itself (lll.ii.) Leontes announces the change. Having received the report of Mamillius* death, he cries "Apollo's angry, and the heavens themselves/ Do strike at my injustice" (144-5). As Hermione swoons, he announces the activation of faith as the dominant theme when he says, "Apollo pardon/ My great profaneness 'gainst thine oracle" (151-2).

The placement of Leontes' sudden change of heart seems a par­ ticularly striking mode of achieving continuity when it is realized 109 that in most Tudor tragicomedy the sudden change in character comes either very early in the course of the play or very late. Sudden

turnabouts in character, of course, are a conventional feature of

tragicomedy from its earliest appearances in England. In Elizabethan

tradicomedy, however, the usual place for rapid change is either very

early in the action, as in Lyly's "tragicall Comedie" Campaspe, where

it serves as a springboard to launch the narrative, or very late

in the play, as in Damon and Pithias, where it functions as a last- minute prevention of tragedy. In The Winter's Tale Leontes goes through one rapid change of character in Act One,Scene Two; this is an ac­

cepted part of the genre. To have the next shift occur in Act Three

instead of the catastrophe, however, is quite unconventional. It

obscures the formal division of the action and, thus, emphasizes

the continuity between one part and the next.

The introduction of Bohemian characters into this same act

further emphasizes the continuity. Time is relegated to the fourth

act and, thus, guarantees that the act divisions seem fortuitous,

a function of the plot's chronological demands rather than an ar­

tificially contrived division of individual structural elements.

The play's structural form, then, functions as a careful expression

of the continuity of the all-important theme. Its inartificial effect,

in fact, is deliberately sought as a mode of securing a formal,

structural continuity directly expressive of the continuity in the

thematic logic of the work. Actually, in its effort to achieve the

"unconditioned dominance" of a single theme, the play invests as much effort in abjuring an artificial effect as Two Gentlemen devotes 110 to achieving the exact opposite.

Similarly, The Winter's Tale works to achieve a different

sort of balance among the structural units from the balance in a work like Two Gentlemen of Verona. Since the structure depends upon a pattern of logical inference rather than the causal progression pre-supposed by the five-act pattern, the balance among the parts

is inevitably different. In a Renaissance play the linkage among the acts is essentially a matter of causality and progression in the plot; Act One of Two Gentlemen closes because Proteus is leaving

Verona to join Valentine, and Act Two begins because Proteus has joined Valentine in Milan. The artificial, contrived link between

the two is obvious. With such a progression as the basis of the struc­ tural unity, as we have seen, no one act can be more important than any other, for each one is directly dependent on the others. Remove or change any one and the whole play becomes different because all the others must be changed too. Dramatic tension, thus, increases at a progressive rate; each new level in the plot adds another step to the complications and to the tension until the whole affair

is resolved in the catastrophe. The balance among the parts is es­

sentially a symmetry whichtrests upon the catastrophe. In The Winter's

Tale, however, the pattern which organizes the work is the inferential

logic of the skeptical fideist. Having two basic possibilities to

examine, it does not progress directly to a single conclusion but

rather develops through a first climax and then to a second climax.

It first builds tension toward the important rejection of knowledge

in Act Three; then, with tension reduced to a minimum in Act Four Ill it builds to a new, even higher climax in Act Five. In terms of impact upon the audience, at least, some sections become more im­ portant than others because they are more intensely powerful than other s. Some structural units, e.g.. Act Four, could, in fact, be changed and large segments deleted without affecting the fable (notably the pastoral comedy) because they are not linked to other sections in a causal pattern. Yet they are indispensable to the inferential logic of the theme because of the very way they reduce tension to its lowest point in the whole play and, thus, enable the fideistic possibilities of the theme to be examined and developed with the same sort of increasing tension as were the skeptical arguments. Like the deliberately inartificial effect, then, the highly unstable equilib­ rium among the parts of the play's structure develops from the impulse to unify the whole work under the dominance of the skeptical fideist theme. The play carefully sacrifices neat, progressive de­ velopment in order to achieve the more volatile pattern of dramatic tension demanded by the inferential pattern of the play's thematic argument.

In the same way. The Winter's Tale deliberately violates all

the usual limits upon dramatic form in order to achieve clear formal dominance for the two scenes most critically important to the expres­ sion of the play's unifying theme. In a Renaissance play such as

Two Gentlemen of Verona the formal limits implied by the protasis- epitasis-catastrophe formula demand strict observance. To exceed

them is to fall short of the ideal, and to fall short of the ideal form is to obscure the vitally important design unifying the sep- 112 arate elements of the play. In a Baroque play like The Winter's Tale, however, the central theme, not an artificial design, is the source of the play's unity; the limits upon the play's form, therefore, must be violated wherever they bind the theme too tightly. In fact, the play exceeds the limits whenever such excess promises to increase

the impact of the thematic statement. Thus, the two key scenes in

the thematic statement deliberately exceed the Renaissance formula's limits in order to achieve the formal dominance commensurate with their thematic importance. The trial scene distorts the nature of comic epitasis by pushing plot complexity and tension into the domain of tragedy. This scene being the point at which the skeptical rejection of knowledge is completed, it is obviously crucial to the theme.

Being thematically dominant, the scene is rendered formally dominant ty its exceeding the limits, by raising dramatic tension to a level

totally unpredictable and unexpected for a point so early in the play, and thus achieving an impact which makes it clearly the most powerful and most important scene in the work until the final event of the drama. Even more significantly, the play defies the usual limits by including a normal conclusion, the off-stage recognition scene reported in the second scene of Act Five, in order to add greater emphasis to its own particular conclusion by placing it after the reconciliation between Leontes, Perdita, Polixenes, and

Florizel. The resurrection of Hermione is the most important element

in the play's thematic statement, for it provides total confirmation of the need for faith, even totally irrational faith, in the awesome goodness of super-human providence. As the conclusion to the devel- 113 opment of the fideistic theme, it is the most important point In the play, and it takes place after the orthodox comic catastrophe precisely because such placement outside the usual limits helps it gain the dramatic force which it needs in order to achieve the for­ mal dominance befitting its thematic importance. In fact, the final scene is the most significant moment in the expression of the theme, for it completes and fulfills the fideistic arguments and fully allays the faith versus knowledge conflict, which has been developing since the second scene of Act One, with an unequivocal statement of faithfs primacy. Being so crucial to the theme which has been the prime determinant of the play's form, it must be the dominant factor in the play's form, the moment which explains and over-shadows every other element in the drama. To achieve this kind of centrality, ...the scene deliberately exceeds the ordinary limits. To seem as miraculous an event as the theme demands, the scene of Hermione's return is carefully placed as a catastrophe to the already fabulous catastrophe of the ordinary comic resolution.

The whole play, thus, arrives at a Baroque unified unity. The

Renaissance formula for dramatic structure is modified to meet the demands of the play's particular theme. In the process of this mod­ ification the structure achieves all the characteristics of the

Baroque open form of structure, and these open form traits help to render the play a more perfect vehicle for the expression of the particular theme of skeptical fideism. CHAPTER IV

THE CHARACTERIZATION

In this chapter I want to talk about characterization in The

Winter's Tale in terms of the shift from Renaissance multiple unity to Baroque unified unity. In essence, I hope to show that character­ ization in Shakespeare's earlier works is a process of creating dramatic personages having both an intrinsic interest as individual representations of human psychological and social issues and an extrinsic value as subordinate parts in the dramatic and thematic development of the whole play; in other words, multiple unity is the key concept in understanding characterization in Shakespeare's

J earlier plays. In contrast, however, I also intend to argue that

Baroque unified unity is the basic principle underlying character­ ization in the late plays, especially The Winter's Tale. Charac­ terization in this play becomes essentially a process of reducing intrinsic interest in the individual dramatic character in order to focus attention upon his thematic function. The characters are made less complex, for instance; each is presented in terms of a single, all-dominating trait rather than in terms of multiple complementary or conflicting traits. Consequently, the audience perceives dramatic conflict in terms of single, clearly defined, often sensationally theatrical issues rather than in terms of multiple significance. 114 115

In fact, characterization in this play functions primarily as a method of expressing the dominant theme of skeptical fideism; there

seems to be little attempt to create characters who demand consider­

ation for their own merit, and in truth, there seems to be much

effort devoted to rendering the characters inseparable from the theme_

they present. Consequently, their nature as dramatic characters

is different from Shakespeare’s earlier creations, for the later figures are not intended to be separable or aesthetically appealing

except within the context of the play of which they are a part.

Their merit is not so much a product of the truth which they express

individually as it is a function of their power in contributing

to the force of the whole play.

Two of Shakespeare’s earlier creations, Falstaff and Shylock, can serve for the moment as typical of the way Renaissance patterns of characterization generally function. There is an old story, per­ haps not to be credited yet significant for the grain of truth it

contains, that when Elizabeth I had seen the Henry IV plays she was so enamored of the fat old Vice, Falstaff, that she asked Shakespeare

to concoct a play about Sir John in love. The result, of course, was The Merry Wives of Windsor. Since it originates with Gildon, who recorded it in 1710, the story must be considered apocryphal by most standards of scholarly decorum; yet it is widely recognized as true, and hardly an introduction to The Merry Wives of Windsor has ever been written without mentioning so likely seeming a tale. Falstaff is an endearing fellow, and most people find him so charming in and for himself that they, like Queen Elizabeth, want to see more of him 11-6

even in total separation from the themes of honor and the state

which he helps to explore in Henry IV. Similarly, many a Shakespearean

has conceived a passionate attachment to Shylock. Within the play

he has obvious thematic functions to perform, none of them heroic

or even very pleasant. He represents commercial greed, urban inhu­ manity, Italian blood lust, Jewish cunning, vicious legalism, and

merciless justice, none of which would seem to make a particularly

pleasant person. Yet, thousands of people have felt a passionate

liking for this character; some have even seen him as a hero because

he is so represented by the playwright as to engender an interest

in himself as an individual character even in separation from the

whole of The Merchant of Venice.

The creation of precisely such intrinsically fascinating char- •

acters is one major goal of virtually all English Renaissance drama,

and modern studies of Renaissance aesthetic, literary, and dramatic

theory underscore this truth at every point. In particular, two the­

ories shared by all the Renaissance commentators help to explain

the kind of intrinsic interest with which Renaissance dramatists

attempted to endow their characters. In the first place, the idea

of art as "holding the mirror up to nature," familiar from all sorts

of Renaissance sources, has particular applications to dramatic

character. And in the second place, the way that neo-classical

dramatic theory prescribed a set of transcendentally Ideal goals for

characterization, much as it did for structure, implies an idea

of characterization as a discrete dramatic function, with goals and

standards of its own, which proceeds largely independent of concern 117

with the themes and development of the particular play.

For the Renaissance, of course, the whole value of art generally,

and literature particularly, grew from the artist's ability, in

Horace's phrase, to delight and to instruct. Sidney, for instance,

in his Defence of Poetry gives the poet even greater eminence than

the historian and the philosopher because while the latter two

can give moral instruction, they frequently become so boring as to make their teachings laboriously difficult to learn. Thus, they are

often ignored. The poet, however, delights the student and makes

him anxious to leam. Moreover, where the historian in particular

is limited to stating mere fact and, thus, to recording the neces­

sarily imperfect deeds of men who live in a universe where all

nature, including their own, is debased, the poet reflects nature

in the improving glass of his art and presents truths almost in

accordance with the ideal conditions which nature, since Adam, has

been unable to achieve. The historian, for instance, records the

brave deeds of heroes, but he must also record the grand vices which

accompany most great men. The poet, though, can perfect these heroes

and present the heroic personality as it would be in an ideal state

where men are not flawed by original sin. He can inspire his audience with the teachings which are more nearly morally perfect than any­

thing the historian can record.^

Needless to say, this idea of art as "holding the mirror up

to nature" occurs in many places besides the works of Sir Philip

^Sidney, Defence, in Works, III,. 7-8. 118

Sidney. Sidney’s particular theory of drama, in fact, exerted rela­ tively little influence on the popular theater. Sidney and his circle preferred Senecan closet drama in imitation of Robert Gamier; plays like Fulke Greville’s Mustapha and Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra, works never produced in a theater, were the result of his dramatic theory.

The ’’mirror" concept for which he was so eloquent a spokesman, however, had a definite effect on the mainstream of English theater life. Hamlet is only one of several dramatic characters to mention the idea in a play (lll.ii.29-47), and the idea was, in fact, a commonplace of the age. It complemented, of course, the older idea that drama was to present a moral exemplum for the edification of the audience. Extending back to Medieval drama, the idea that drama had a homiletic purpose is at the root of many Tudor plays and interludes, and it underlies most Elizabethan domestic drama such as Arden of Feversham.

The combined concepts of the mirror and the exemplum encouraged the dramatist to focus upon the individual character as a discrete entity containing in himself a reflection of a particular part of nature as well as a part of a larger imitation. The point of an exem­ plum as opposed to a parable or a fable is to show that particular results actually and historically result from a particular action in human life. The individual dramatic character, thus, must seem 2 realistic; he must appear to be a "real-life" person. Therefore, he should conform to prevailing psychological theory, since this

2 See Levin Ludwig Schucking. Character Problems in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Harrap, 1922), pp. 237-65. 119 provides the key to the way both writer and audience alike inter­ pret the personalities in their everyday lives. The individual char­

acter should reflect the characteristics of real personality types met with in ordfnâcy life» Thus, much of Elizabethan drama reveals a great deal of concern with contemporary psycho-physiological

theory of the humors and passions to explain how and why characters

commit their actions. Many characters in Elizabethan plays also reflect commonly-held ideas about certain sorts of people. Pros­

titutes and rogues conform to the patterns of underworld behavior

as seen in popular works like Greene's Cony-catching pamphlets;

Jews fit .the prevailing anti-Semitic prejudices; prosperous burghers

reveal the virtues and vices of their class. In essence, the in­ dividual character provides the key to the exemplum of the drama;

the characters must be interesting and the situation real, or the moral force of the play's argument is defeated by the audience's

inability to place themselves in the context of the action, to read

their own faults in the faults of the characters, and to see the

consequences of their own actions in the consequences befalling the deeds of the characters.

Running parallel to this sort of emphasis upon the importance of individually interesting characters was the whole force of Renais­

sance dramatic theory. The neo-classical commentators on Roman and,

to a decidedly lesser extent, Greek and Renaissance drama, provided

the basic approach to drama for generations of school teachers and

their students. The commentators conceptualized characterization

as a distinct process in the creation of a play. As they understood 120

it character creation and portrayal had certain known ideals which

it was to strive to achieve, and the nature of these ideals was

unaffected by the theme and structure of the particular play. They

prescribed a transcendent set of standards by which one could judge

whether characters had been well or ill portrayed, and it mattered

not at all whether the characters being judged had appeared in Eu-

nuchus or The Comedy of Errors, Hercules Furens or Ferrex and Forrex.

The ideals for characterization were known, and the playwright's

duty was to actualize those ideals in his particular play, or, at

least, to do his best.

Basic to these ideals, as to the whole literary aesthetic

of the Renaissance, was the concept of decorum. In ancient drama,

of course, decorum was purely social at its roots; the idea was that

certain social classes had certain characteristics, and the dra­ matist was to restrict his characters to the traits proper to their

status. This social decorum was the stricture upon which Renaissance

commentators were most insistent. Comedy required middle-class char­

acters; tragedy demanded upper-class figures. Plays with mixtures

of social classes were to maintain strict rhetorical differentiation

among the various types. Kings, being the highest social types, had a particularly regal manner to be observed. Their diction was

to be elevated, their tone solemn, their metaphors and similes drawn

from the poets, philosphers, and historians. Their thoughts were

to be profound or, at least, sententious. Nobles and aristocrats were to be but slightly less solemn and high sounding. The middle-

classes, however, the merchants, craftsmen, and farmers, were to 121 be considerably more crass. Their proper medium was prose, and their diction ordinary. Simile and metaphor were drawn from the substance of their livelihood, commerce and agriculture, and from the familiar wisdom of their class, proverbs, sayings, and tales. The lower classes, peasants and servants, were to be dominated by their silliness, folly, or, at best, base cunning. Their diction was to be mean, and their tropes coarsely vulgar in both form and substance. Their total effect was to be laughably funny.

Other factors beside social class, however, also effected the observance of decorum. The age, na^ïhnality. and sex of a character helped to determine his depiction. Old men were to assume the char­ acteristics of senex, the old man; they were to exhibit a senile penchant for recalling old memories and a childish taste for self-in­ dulgent egotism. The middle-aged man was to have some show of dig­ nity, the young man a hot-headed passion for love and for glory.

Italians had to be vengeful and passionate, Spaniards cruel and

proud, Welshmen irascible. Women were to be either sweetly fair

and innocent or monstrously cruel and vicious.

At their bases, then, both the idea of the "mirror up to nature;" with its insistence upon drama as a moral example, and the ideal of

dramatic decorum, with its belief in . a severely restricted number

of human types, functioned to enforce a Renaissance concept of mul­

tiple unity by insisting upon the autonomy of dramatic characters

as individual entities, valid and interesting in reference to a num­

ber of forces outside the particular play where they occur. The mirror concept demanded that the character be in himself a mimetic 122 reflection of some known and immediately recognizable human behavior pattern. The character, thus, became meaningful in himself; the audience could find him pleasing and instructional not only as a part of a whole story but also as a separate entity, for as one part of an example of a human moral predicament he became in himself a psychologically and morally complex being. Primary and secondary characters alike had distinct referents in the everyday experience of the audience, and the audience was expected to judge and enjoy

the individual character not only in terms of his contribution

to the thematic and dramatic development of the whole play but also in individual reference to the people they met and saw in the real world. Thus, even a minor character like the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet / could command an interest quite out of proportion to her role in the thematic and dramatic development of the whole work, for in ful­ filling her part in the moral example of the play she reflects that

amiably boorish coarseness which is, in fact, a part of everyday living. Falstaff assumes a life of his own because in developing his part of the political and ethical example of Henry IV he is also an imitation of the happily self-vindicating, slothfully vicious

sensuality which is part of life; an audience can judge him both

in reference to daily experience and in the context of the play's

themes of honor and politics.

Similarly, and in conjunction with the Medieval concept of art as a perfecting mirror, the ideal of decorum sets up criteria for appreciating characters per se, almost without reference to their

thematic function, by positing ideals which precede and transcend 123 the particular play. These standards demand the playwright to observe a group of basically social controls on characterization and to deal with certain human types, no matter how much or how little those controls and types may have to do with the particular theme which underlies his whole work. Thus, when a legitimate king, not a tyrant, figures in the plot, that king can be assessed and the dramatist's powers of characterization rated on the basis of how regally the king speaks and acts. When a youth appears, the primary aesthetic judgment rests not upon the efficiency with which he fulfills the particular thematic and dramatic function assigned him in the devel­ opment of. the whole work but rather upon the degree to which the artist realizes the ideal characteristics of a young man in his creation, even though the thematic and dramatic functions must be fulfilled at the same time that decorum is observed. The result is that in a thoroughly Renaissance play like Dekker's The Shoemaker's

Holiday the dramatic figures are remarkable not only for their effect in creating a dramatized glorification of the virtues of

London but also for the thoroughness with which all of them, even so wild and woolly a character as the madcap Lord Mayor, Simon

Eyre, restrict themselves to expressions and actions absolutely proper to their class, age, nationality, and sex. A character like

Shylock achieves his stature precisely because of the way Shakespeare, even as he molds the character to the demands of the play, observes decorum in creating a figure endowed with all the qualities of both a successful, dignified merchant and a Venetian Jew.

In other words, then, characterization in Renaissance drama ' 124

is directly geared to achieving a multiple type of aesthetic unity.

A play, of course, must be unified and must have some dominating

theme and pattern. Individual characters, thus, must contribute to

the effect of the whole work. Those same characters, however, must

have merit and significance when considered individually and in

separation from the themes and forms of the whole. They must not

only fit the demands of decorum, they must also serve in themselves

as pleasing and edifying examples of life as reflected in the dra­ matist's perfecting glass.

In Baroque drama such as The Winter's Tale, however, the

Renaissance urge for multiple unity has mutated into a Baroque

impulse toward unified unity, and some obvious changes in the pro­

cess of characterization manifest the nature and extent of this mod­

ification, In general, the changes amount to three types of alter­

ation— a clearer identification between individual character and

particular thematic function, a more closely controlled emphasis

upon the integration of individual character into the context of

the whole, and a contrived de-emphasis of character elements likely

to endow the character with a significance extending outside his

role in the dramatic and thematic development of the play. More

particularly, these changes can be summarized as a tendency to pre­

sent characters in terms of single, exaggerated traits rather than multiple, conflicting-complementing ones, a tendency to focus a

character's presentation (i.e., his own speeches, other characters'

descriptions of him, etc.) around a severely restricted number of

considerations, and a tendency to sacrifice decorum and complexity 125 in favor of sensationally theatrical situations having immediate thematic significance.

In other words, Baroque characterization tends to neglect the individual value of the character and to emphasize his contribution to the thematic statement of the whole, thus rendering the character uninterpretable except in reference to the thematic context of the whole play in which he is merely a part. Clearly, such a style of characterization can easily verge into allegory and symbolism, for like the allegorical method it emphasizes the thematic value of the 3 figures appearing in the narrative. And yet, allegorical and sym­ bolic readings of The Winter's Tale, and of Baroque drama generally, should be tempered with the reminder that Baroque characterization is a modification of Renaissance styles, not an opposition to them.

Characters are almost never reduced to a purely allegorical or sym­ bolic level; they retain much of the individualized personality which the Renaissance had striven after, but they simplify th:t terms in which that personality is presented in order to give greater clarity and emphasis to the thematic value which the Renaissance had sought also.

The result of Baroque modifications, in fact, usually appears in characters, typical of much later Jacobean and Caroline drama, who can be given allegorical interpretation but who are more accurately described as sensationalized and theatrical. Characters such as l

Fletcher's Arbaces, Middleton's DeFlores, Ford's Giovanni, and

See, e.g., George Wilson Knight, "Great Creating Nature," in The Crown of Life, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1948), pp. 76-128, for a symbolic interpretation of the play. 126

Shirley’s Cardinal are notoriously thin and strained when compared,

out of context, with Marlowe’s Faustus, Kyd’s Hieronymo, Heywood’s

Franklin, and Shakespeare’s Richard II. These later figures are,

quite simply, lacking in the depth and complexity of the Renaissance

creations which preceded them. Yet, what the Baroque figures lack

in complexity is compensated for by the power and clarity with which

they are depicted. Ford’s protagonist in ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore,

for instance, is tissue thin when compared to the hero of Kyd’s

Spanish Tragedy, but Ford’s Giovanni compensates for his lack of

complexity by presenting himself in the highly exaggerated and, thus,

immediately recognizable terms of a single, all dominating character

trait. Hieronymo never achieves such clarity, for he is a relatively

complex being. His passion for revenge is far from being his only

trait, for it is tempered and, thus, to some degree obscured by his

concerns for religion, for honor, for justice, for his own Spanish

pride, and for all the other issues which are raised in the process of his depiction. In responding to him, the audience sees and under­

stands many things about him which have no direct connection with his vengeance, and he assumes a significance ranging far beyond his

role as a revenger. Resultantly, he is not a simple figure to deal with, for there are many facets of the man to be considered before passing judgment, either moral, social, or psychological, upon him,

and there are even more factors to be weighed before passing an aesthetic judgment upon his depiction. To what extent can his actions be attributed to his nature as a Spanish nobleman? How well does he

epitomize the characteristics of an aging father? And so on. Giovanni, 127 on the other hand, is a simple figure, and judgments can be made quite quickly. He has one trait, his incestuous love for his sister, and this one element of his character is all that matters. He has no discernible opinions on religion or the state; though he knows that the Church calls incest sin, he ignores the canon law rather than argue against it. His Italian background and aristocratic status have only secondary bearing upon his presentation. In fact, except for the way he lusts after his sister and the paths he follows in pursuing his lust, we know almost nothing about him. His story can, quite seriously, be interpreted as an allegory of the sin of incest, yet few would wish so to interpret it. Giovanni is not an allegorical figure; he is a dramatic character, but he is presented from a strictly limited point of view which emphasizes and exaggerates some features while it obscures others. That viewpoint, of course, is carefully chosen to emphasize those features which most help to clarify the play's central theme of incest, and the audience's aesthetic judgment upon the quality of his characterization must depend upon the power and effectiveness with which the character expresses the dominant trait which helps clarify the theme. Thus, the depiction frequently moves into sensationalism and theatrical display because these add strength and force to the clarity of his presentation. As a consequence of this altered mode of character­ ization, the Baroque protagonist becomes thinner but clearer, less complex but more fully integrated with his play's theme, than his

Renaissance precursor. In consistently focusing attention upon a single, exaggerated characteristic, Giovanni directs the audience 128

toward a single, all-important thematic conflict and, thus, contributes

to a truly Baroque form of unified unity in 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, while Hieronymo and his complexities help to create a distinctly

Renaissance type of multip 1 e The Spanish Tragedy.

In The Winter's Tale Shakespeare's methods of characterization

come much closer to Ford's Baroque style than to Kyd's Renaissance mode. Each character is dominated by a ruling passion; all the char­

acters are depicted in terms of a very few characteristics, and there

is a studied control and limitation over the amount of complexity

the audience is allowed to see. As a result of the stringent severity

with which characters develop, they achieve a clarity and simplicity

such as few of Shakespeare's earlier creations possess, and this

simple clarity helps focus the audience's attention upon a single

thematic issue expressed in the conflict between character and

character. So strictly limited, in fact, is the complexity revealed

by the various characters that they verge almost into allegorizations

at several points, and the whole process of characterization comes

remarkably close to dramatized symbolism for the skeptical fideist

theme which underlies the whole of the play. The characters retain,

however, their individualized personalities so effectively that the

sensational theatrics of the play never seem to be symbolic only,

and they retain their dramatic force as events in human life.

Leontes, most notably, is characterized in terms of single,

dominant traits. In the first half of the play, his jealousy controls

his whole depiction; in the second half, his repentance dominates

his characterization, and throughout the whole play his character 129 develops entirely in terms of these two opposite extremes of a single passion. In his first appearance, he almost immediately conceives his monstrous passion. After exchanging a few words with Polixenes and Hermione, in which he says just enough to reveal his love for each of them, he suddenly finds himself in the grip of a "tremor cordis" of passion. Unexpected, totally causeless, and completely irrational, the jealousy is presented as coming upon him in a moment of apparent calm and seeming happiness. From the moment of his first suspicious

"Too hot! Too hot!" (I.ii.108) to the moment when, in a cold rage of fury, he can wonder whether his son Maraillius is his own (119-20) only a minute or less elapses in a normal speaking voice's delivery time. Another eight lines and he is sure of the cuckold’s horns upon his head, and less than a hundred lines later (211) he calls

Camillo in to help him with Folixenes’ murder. The passion, then, is presented as coming upon him with extraordinary force and speed, and the net effect of the exaggerated, almost superhuman power of this jealousy is both to emphasize the totality with which it engrosses his personality and to detract attention from questions as to how and why it comes upon him. The audience sees the inception and the extraordinarily rapid growth of his delusion; they know it is abso­ lutely groundless, irrational, and unexplainable. There need be no

Iago or lachimo to serve as an immediate cause or explanation for the fit that holds Leontes; the passion is presented as an irrational delusion and nothing else.^ From this point on, the play presents

See W. I. D. Scott, "Leontes— the Paranoic," in Shakespeare’s Melancholics (London: Mills & Boon, 1962), pp. 145-62. 130 virtually all that Leontes says and does in reference to his jealousy.

It has been shown to come upon him quickly and strongly; it allows him no time for introspection or self-justification. It is simply there, and its exaggerated presence is the sole explaining factor for everything he does or says from then on.

In the process of Leontes’ characterization as almost the personification of jealousy, the demands of decorum and moral instruc­ tion are sacrificed to the need for complete clarity in the presen­ tation of his dominating trait. Decorum, of course, is not simply ignored, but it is observed only loosely. It is freely violated wherever it might restrict or impair the power with which Leontes expresses his passion. Decorum, in other words, affects his char­ acterization wherever it can help to stress the meaning and nature of his jealousy; where it cannot help, it is ignored. Polixenes, thus, can point out that the towering force of his friend’s emotion is commensurate with his position; "as his person’s mighty/ Must it

[his jealousy] be violent" (I.ii.451-2). Leontes can, as decorum dictates that a king should, allude to the philosophers in his conversation, but the passages he chooses come from the Stoics’ advice on how to seek comfort when one finds himself a cuckold.^

Like any prince he can discourse upon the state, but only when explaining his right to try the Queen even without the consent of of his courtiers (II.i.161-5) or accusing those who oppose him of

Cf. I.ii.189-206. to Charron’s statements on being a cuckold. Of Wisdom, p. 96 (sig. G6). Similar passages appear in Lipsius’ Of Constancie and More’s Comforte. 131 being traitors (Il.iii.l30). Decorum never checks the expression of his passion, even when it leads him into speaking and acting in the basest of fashions. As he accuses Hermione, he says:

0 thou thing I Which I’ll not call a creature of thy place. Lest barbarism, making me a precedent, Should a like language use to all degrees And mannerly distinguishment leave out Betwixt the prince and beggar. (lI.i.82-7)

Yet he has himself been guilty of precisely such "barbarism" in several places. In his fit, he is portrayed as speaking the vulgar language of a peasant: "Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a forked one" (I.ii.185). His diction is made to be as coarsely ordinary and repetitiously restricted as the most illiterate of his subjects’: "You lie. You lie./ I say thou liest, Camillo, and I hate thee for a gross lout, a mindless slave" (I.ii.298-9). He can exhibit an almost total lack of regal eloquence and coherence, as in the inexplicable passage beginning "Affection, thy intention stabs the center" (I.ii.138-46).

Decorum, then, is never indulged simply for its own sake, and the truth of this statement appears nowhere more clearly than in the pathetic critical efforts to interpret Leontes as a political and social being.^ Only the most constrained forms of digging can unearth any evidence at all for the way Leontes relates to the

"Mirror for Princes" and de casibus traditions. He says and does very little which marks him as a prince, a being of a different

6 See, e.g., Paul N. Siegal, "Leontes a Jealous Tyrant," RES, n.s. 1 (1950), 302-7. 132 order from other men, except to enforce a trial on the basis of his will alone. He says so little about the state, in fact, as to make it very difficult to deduce the nature of his social concepts. More­ over, nothing about him seems to have particular bearing upon his age or nationality. He is, in fact, throughout the first half of the play, a jealous man, and decorum only helps to emphasize that jealousy and never to distract from it by presenting him as a prince, an ancient

Greek, or anything else but passionate.

Similarly, Leontes' depiction as a man gripped by jealousy overrides considerations of his presentation as a moral exemplum or a psychological type. He is, of course, in some sense an example of how jealousy affects a man, and the play is to some degree an exemplum of jealousy and the power of repentance. And yet Leontes is not simply a mirrored reflection in the poet's glass of what it means for a man to be jealous; he is both less and more. He is less in that his jealousy is not presented as a passion which has come to dominate and denigrate the personality of a whole, complex,

"realistic" human being. When a Renaissance character such as Romeo or Shylock succumbs to the passion of love or vengeance, that passion is shown as coming to hold sway over a host of other traits in the character. Romeo, though he falls in love, continues to value his friends, to have a passionate temper, to be engaged in the family feud, to have a youthful fondness for purple lyricism, and so on.

As Shylock grows more vengeful, he also reveals more and more about his greed, his contempt for all Christians, his love of his daughter, his pride in his tribe, etc. Each becomes in his respective manner 133 an exemplum of how particular passions affect a whole personality. They are, in fact, reflections of individual beings who have given in to a certain single vice, and they contain in themselves a moral lesson for the audience. Leontes is not such a character; he is a man with only one trait, jealousy. In a sense, then, he is less than Romeo and

Shylock, for he reveal? just this one trait. We know other things about him, of course; he and Polixenes are friends, he loves Hermione and Mamillius, etc. We learn these things, however, through only the briefest of indications by himself, and they are swallowed up by his passion once it is conceived. He is not, in fact, an exemplum, a picture of jealousy’s causes, growth, and effects upon a man, for his jealousy grows too fast and becomes too domiharib-. Thus, in another sense, he is also more than an exemplum, for he reveals jealousy unobscured by other issues and exaggerated into complete clarity, unmitigated by any redeeming factors or characteristics. He is less a mirror of a man than a reflection of a particular vice or passion, and he is not so much a lesson in how a vicious passion can debase an entire personality as he is a description of the nature of a particular evil.

Leontes' consistency of presentation as a particular and familiar psycho-physiological type goes by the board along with decorum and moralization. He is, of course, to some degree melancholic, and thé Elizabethan psychology is called into play wherever it helps increase the effect of his representation of jealousy. Thus, he refers to "tremor cordis" (l.ii.llO) and to the drawing together of his eyebrows (I.ii.119), but he is never portrayed as having any real 134 indications of a particularly splenetic condition, a bodily illness, or anything else which would enable an audience to identify him with any particular brand of psycho-physiological disorder. His jealousy is there, and one can attribute it to what causes he wishes.

The dramatist, however, provides no hints that Leontes falls into any real category of personality types; he offers no commentary on the nature of melancholic diseases in the way that Romeo, pale and wan, or Shylock, lean and wizened, does.

Like Ford's Giovanni, then, Leontes is characterized through­ out the first half of the play in terms of a single, all-important trait. This trait is used as a method of focusing attention squarely upon the play's central thematic issue, skeptical fideism. In par­ ticular, Leontes' jealousy is important to the development of the skeptical argument of the play's first half. As we have seen in

Chapter Two, his passion brings him into repeated conflict with the other characters, and it is this conflict which expresses and dramatizes the faith-knowledge conflict of the whole play. Camillo,

Hermione, Antigonus, the unnamed Lord, Paulina, and finally Apollo himself confront Leontes with the need to drop his passion, and their arguments are always couched in terms of the need for faith in

Hermione and faith in the gods. Repeatedly, Leontes defends himself against their attacks on the grounds that he knows the truth, and only their "ignorant credulity" prevents their agreeing with him.

He presents no extraneous character traits to detract attention from the faith-knowledge conflict, and his whole depiction in terms of this one trait helps concentrate the work around that one issue. 135

His characterization as a clear and unequivocal picture of the workings

of this one passion and the pain and crime into which it leads him

serve as dramatic buttresses to the idea that knowledge is never,

more than senseless illusion. His characterization, thus, helps

unify the play around the central theme.

After Mamillius* death Leontes is made to do a complete about

face. He repents his sin and enters into a penance more quickly de­

veloped than his passion. Presented as more powerful and longer

lasting than his original passion, this penitent condition dominates

his characterization in the last half of the play just as jealousy

did in the first part. He disappears from the scene of the action, of

course, for more than a full act, but as he makes his last exit in

Act Three, he has already entered into a penitential state. When he

reappears in Act Five, he is shown to have endured sixteen years of

Paulina’s reproaches and still remain firm in his continual conscious­

ness of sin. So far as the audience is allowed to discover, he has

done nothing for sixteen years except repent for his actions. Even

the arrival of Florizel and Perdita serves only to sharpen his re­

membrance of his sin, and the discovery of Perdita’s Identity, though

it gladdens him, serves mainly to prompt him to rueful cries of "0

,thy mother, thy mother" (V.ii.49-50) and requests for Polixenes*

forgiveness.

Again, this careful depiction in terras of a single trait

adds to the Baroque unified unity of the play by concentrating the

whole effect of the work around the theme of fideism dominating the

last part of the play. Repentant and desirous of forgiveness, Leontes 136

has no other qualities but his penitence, and so he is uniquely

prepared for the act of irrational and miraculous faith which is

the key to the play's comic conclusion. His depiction in this single mode helps focus attention squarely on the central thematic issue without drawing in irrelevant questions, and the net effect is to present the fideistic theme in terms strikingly powerful and ines­

capably effective.

Perhaps even more than Leontes, Hermione is a study in the

Baroque pattern of characterization. She begins the play as probably

the most complex and "realistic" character in The Winter's Tale, but her "development" through the play moves farther and farther away

from complexity, closer and closer to allegory, and by the final

scene she has assumed a value which is almost totally symbolic.

As the play opens, Hermione and Polixenes dominate the conversation.

Polixenes reveals little about himself which could not be predicted

about a king who has long been on a visit to a boyhood friend; he

is gracious, fond of his friend, and anxious to return to Bohemia.

Hermione, however, reveals much about herself. She is shown to be witty, gay, disposed to banter, deeply fond of her husband, and,

a truly "realistic" element in her early characterization, eager for

anecdotes about the childhood of the man she loves.

Needless to say, this realism in her depiction adds tremendously

to the pathos of her later sufferings. Yet, after her brief conver--

sation with Mamillius at the start of Act Two, her characterization

undergoes a remarkable narrowing of scope. In a pattern exactly opposite to Portia's or Juliet's, she does not reveal greater and 137

greater depth and complexity as the play progresses; rather, her depiction becomes more and more concentrated around one or two

primary traits. While the expression of those characteristics becomes

extremely powerful, the audience’s consciousness of the scope of her personality decreases rapidly after Act Two. Until the moment of

Leontes* accusation, she remains a ’’realistic" character, but from

the moment of her exit for prison she comes more and more to be a

symbol of "honesty and honor" (ll.ii.lO).

Even from her first appearance, of course, virtue and honor

are shown to be among Hermione’s primary character traits. Her speeches

consistently recur to these two themes, and they form the basic

concern of her personality. The argument with which she finally

convinces Polixenes to extend his visit, for instance, is couched

in exactly such terminology. Her speech begins by pointing out that

had Polixenes sworn an oath to leave, she would "thwack him hence with distaffs" (I.ii.37), for she will have no transgressions

of honesty or honor by oath-breaking. Since, though, he puts her off with "limber vows," she will threaten him with dishonor if he tries

to leave, for she will have him jailed and hold him prisoner if he

attempts to go. He, of course, accedes to her request, and she en­ gages him in conversation. Again, she steers their talk to matters

of honesty and honor. Polixenes having mentioned that in youth he

and his friend were so innocent as to have been guiltless even of original sin, she queries him, albeit jestingly, about the nature of their sins since boyhood. He responds that those days were long ago, before he had met his wife or Leontes seen Hermione. "Grace to boot," 138 she responds with a significant exclamation:

Of this make no conclusion, lest you say Your queen and I are devils. Yet go on. The offenses we have made you do we'll answer If you first sinned with us and that with us You did continue fault and that; you slipped not With any but with us. (I.ii.80-6)

Leontes then rejoining their dialogue, Hermione holds to her sub­ ject, this time requesting Leontes to specify the good deed which she did before convincing Polixenes to stay:

One good deed dying tongueless Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that.

My last good deed was to entreat his stay. What was my first? It has an elder sister, Or I mistake you. 0, would her name were Gracel (l.ii.91-9)

Leontes tells her that her previous good deed was to accept his suit, and she responds "'Tis Grace indeed" (105).

Even at her gayest, then, Hermione is portrayed with a deeply sober concern for virtue, good deeds, and grace. When Leontes accuses her of treason and adultery, all gaiety disappears from her life. When she realizes that his accusations are not in jest, her first thought is of the faith he should have in her honesty: "I'll be sworn you would believe my saying/ Howe'er you lean to the nayward" (II.i.63-4).

And her next thought is of the dishonor he is doing to himself; she calls him a term specifically contrary to his regal and honored position:

Should a villain say so. The most replenished villain in the world, He were as much more villain. (II.i.78-80)

From this point on, Hermione becomes less and less complicated. 139 more and more an emblem of "honesty and honor." Her plight is deeply trying, but she reveals none of the complex of emotions which we could expect her to feel. She refuses even to express grief through giving vent to tears, and she instructs her ladies:to cry only when they know her guilty (II.i.119-21). For herself, she will be patient and loyally firm; "The king's will be performed" (II.i.115). Events, she stoically says, must be "for my better grace" (122).

Throughout the rest of the play, Hermione is present in other people's words far more than in her own person, and, thus, she appears to the audience primarily from the highly restricted viewpoint of those who argue with Leontes in her favor. Her absence from the stage combined with her continual presence in other characters' conversation is the key to understanding how her depiction narrows, for throughout the rest of Act Two she clearly becomes more of a symbol than a per­ son. The figures who arise to challenge Leontes throughout the rest of Act Two have little to say about Hermione but much to say about the implications of Leontes' distrusting her. Antigonus takes her as a symbol of all womankind, for he swears to geld his daughters and lodge his wife in his stable if Hermione prove guilty (II.i.134-5,

147). Paulina bitterly complains of Leontes' having a jailer to

"lock up honesty and honor from/ Th'access of gentle visitors" (II.ii.

10-1). She accuses him of betraying his "sacred honor" by his accu­ sations, and she warns him that his "weak-hinged fancy" will make him ignoble.

When Hermione reapppears on stage for the trial scene, she brings with her the calm and dispassionate character of a true Stoic; 140

she is an emblem of patience beneath the lashings of adversity.

Emotion and passion have been completely stilled by reason, and she manifests no such feminine weakness or human doubt as does, say,

Juliet before taking the potion. Two concerns dominate her dialogue,

virtue and honor. More than anything else, she reveals her virtue,

the true Stoic virtue of patience. Specifically, she calls attention to

this quality when, in her opening speech in the trial scene (Ill.ii,),

she mentions her trust that the gods will make Leontes’ tyranny

"Tremble at patience" (31), Life having become a burden to her, she

prizes death: "to me can life be no commodity" (92), More signif­

icantly, however, she reveals her patience in the calmly dispassionate

manner of speaking about herself. In her first response to the ar­

raignment, one of the ploys of her forensic oration is the pathetic

appeal:

For behold me— A fellow of the royal bed, which owe A moiety of the throne, a great king’s daughter. The mother of a hopeful prince— here standing To prate and talk for life and honor ’fore Who please to come and hear, (36-41)

This is a piece of rhetoric, a usage of her condition to point out

the absurdity of what has happened to her, both for the benefit

of the audience and as a part of her defense. It is not a piece of

impassioned oratory concerning her griefs. Again, later in the scene,

she enumerates the reasons for her finding life so grievous as to

make her seek death, but she does so in the most dispassionate and

neatly organized of manners, moving from prime cause to final cause

in a totally lucid progression: 141

The crown and comfort of my life, your favor, I do give lost, for I do feel it gone. But know not how it went. My second joy And first-fruits of my body, from his presence I am barred, like one infectious. My third comfort. Starred most unluckily, is from my breast. The innocent milk in its most innocent mouth. Haled out to murder. Myself on every post Proclaimed a strumpet: with immodest hatred The child-bed privilege denied, which 'longs To women of all fashion. Lastly, hurried Here to this place, i’ th' open air, before I have got strength of limit. (93-105)

Her ability to cite these reasons for death?s attraction, it is true, reveals the consistency with which she has pondered her un­ happiness, but the impressive thing about this catalogue of evils is the way she can recite it without a break. She is sad and solemn, but she does not break her speech for a tear, nor does she elaborate upon any one of her wrongs. With the disinterest of patience, she simply and clearly explains the evils done to her and then lets them stand.

As she explains, in fact, the only thing which makes her wish to speak at all is her concern with honor, for questions of honor relate not only to herself but also to her family (43-4). Except for this issue and the reflections it casts upon her children and her family, she would stand silent, a mute symbol of the patience and virtue which Leontes exiles through jealousy. In all three of her long speeches during the trial, the word "honor" occupies a key spot. She tells Leontes that she did not allow her relationship with

Polixenes to go "one jot beyond/ The bound of honor" (49-50). She admits only to have "loved him as in honor he required" (62).

Finally, she closes her last major speech before the reading of the 142 oracle with a reminder that "but for mine honor" she would not let the trial go on; she does, however, want her honor cleared, and she is certain the oracle will prove Leontes wrong.(109-10).

Throughout the trial scene, in fact, Hermione exhibits no passion and little emotion. She is patient in her virtue, strong in her concern with honor, but disengaged from the situation, unimpas-ir « sioned by her condition. Considering the list of transgressions which

Leontes has committed against her, the audience can only be impressed with her superhuman strength, her lack of passion, and her unwaveringly patient trust in the gods. In fact, that is the point of her charac­ terization. Like Leontes, she is being depicted with clarity as her prime quality. The playwright directs attention away from the psycho­ logical conflicts which rage through the brain of a faithful wife accused of adultery and an honest mother deprived of her children.

He focuses attention away from her pain in order to focus concern upon her major quality of virtue and honor. He is simplifying his presentation of her as a human and complex being in order to concentrate attention upon the thematic issue expressed in her con­ flict with Leontes. Her patience is to contrast with his passion; her virtue is to contrast with his jealousy; her faith is to contrast with his knowledge. To keep this conflict clear, Shakespeare reduces

the complexity with which each of them is developed.

It is not until the final scene, however, that one realizes how fully Hermione has been altered from a personality to a symbol.

After Mamillius' death, of course, Hermione is carried from the stage, not to reappear until the last scene. From this point on, her existence 143

is entirely controlled by the way other people talk about her, and

for all practical purposes this means her characterization depends upon

the conversations between Leontes and Paulina in Act Five and, to a les­

ser extent, Ahtigpnus' statements in the last scene of Act Three where

he claims to have been visited by Hermione*s spirit in a dream.

Needless to say, in Paulina's acerbic dialogue, Hermione is a whip with which she thrashes Leontes. Hermione is the best of women

beside whom all others, even Perdita, must fail. The loss of Hermione,

as she constantly reminds Leontes, was the loss of honor and of hap­

piness, and he need hope for neither of these until he regains his

old queen. He promises, for instance, never to seek the happiness

of marriage without Paulina's approval; Paulina promises never to

approve marriage to anyone except Hermione herself. Hermione ceases

to have any significance as a woman while she takes on ever greater

significance as a symbol of all the happiness, honor, and virtue which Leontes forfeited with his jealous knowledge and for which he has done sixteen years of penance.

The full indication of how thoroughly symbolic a person, she

has become, however, appears only at the moment of her revival. As she descends the pedestal, the audience feels joy, but not for her.

They feel it for Leontes and for the miraculous release from pain which he has achieved through his faith. Hermione, however, so far

as one can tell, has no particular emotions to express; she embraces

Leontes, blesses Perdita, and promises an explanation of how and why

she has preserved herself (V.iii.121-8), but she voices no feelings

about her re-awakening. The audience feels wonder, perhaps, about her 144 revivification, but no joy for her as a human being. She symbolizes the return of happiness and honor, and her revival summarizes the miraculous nature of faith, but Hermione has ceased to be a human personality in any real sense. She has become symbolic, and her ident- ification with the play’s theme has become complete. It is, literally, impossible to talk about her revival' in terms of her psychological condition, in terms of decorum, in terms of human personality. Her appearance can only be treated in terms of the thematic and dramatic exigencies of the play, and her whole characterization has been geared to achieving exactly such an inseparability between her role and the play as a whole.

The minor characters also help to focus attention on the central thematic issue. Paulina's characterization, for instance, focuses almost entirely upon her fiercely devoted love for the Queen. Always a foil to the king, she is given hardly a line which does not point directly to Leontes' sin and Hermione's virtue. Paulina is the strong spokesman for the right, for honor, and for faith. She is the one who, more ferociously than any other, tells Leontes he is wrong. She is the one who reminds him of the magnitude of his sin during the sixteen years of his penance, and she is the one who finally brings

Leontes to the point at which he can reclaim his queen. Aside from this deep love for the "honor and honesty" of Hermione, the playwright reveals almost nothing else about her. From Antigonus we learn that she has three daughters (II.i.140-9), but Paulina herself never men­ tions them. She alludes to Antigonus twice (V.i.42;V.iii.132-5), but she is not revealed as grieving for him until the last lines of the 145 play, just in time to prepare the audience for her betrothal to Cam- illo. Her whole purpose, aside from her slight narrative function, is to focus attention on the theme, and she is allowed to reveal almost nothing about herself to interfere with that one purpose.

Perdita has hardly one hundred lines to speak in the whole play.

She has time, really, to express little more than her love for Flor- izel, her misgivings concerning a match between a prince and a milk­ maid, and, at greatest length, her preference for divine nature rather than human art. She has very little time to establish herself as a character, yet the whole structure of the play guarantees that she serves as a symbol of the remission of Leontes' sins and of renewed life and hope in Sicilia. The main thrust of her depiction is to reinforce this thematic function rather than complicating it or obscuring it by generating any great interest in her for her own sake. Her longest and most memorable bit of dialogue (IV.iv.70-108) is the rather abstract aesthetic argument with Polixenes in which she indicates her love of "great creating nature" and her distrust of human interference with nature’s processes. The implications of this speech have more to with the theme of conflict between human knowledge and divine faith than they do with revealing an intrinsically interest­ ing character, for they serve only to reinforce the idea that Perdita is unsophisticated and pastoral rather than to reveal any new com­ plexity in her character. Compared even to a simple shepherdess from an earlier Shakespearean play, say Touchstone’s Audrey or Silvius’

Phebe in You Like It, Perdita is primarily remarkable for the highly consistent and uncomplicated pattern of her depiction as a 146 child of nature, albeit a noble child. Phebe, at least, is fickle, aggressive, and a bit foolish. Audrey can discourse on the value of being ugly and can bear up under accusations of sluttishness. Perdita, however, reveals far less personality than either of these earlier shepherdesses, for she is revealed to the audience exclusively in terms of her dominating pastoral naturalness and beauty.

Much the same remarks apply to Florizel. He, too, reveals little more than the primary element of his character. He is faithful, constant, and virtuous. When his love for Perdita, true and honest as it is, moves him to defy his father, he does so without a second thought. There is no process of choice for him to go through or to reveal to the audience. He has no traits which conflict with his love of virtue and his faith that the gods will reward constancy. Compared even to an uncomplicated pastoral figure like Silvius in As You Like

It, Florizel is clear and lacking in complications, for the primary

thrust of his characterization is to fix the audience's attention on the power of faith to achieve good goals, even when the goals seem impossible and irrational.

Three other minor characters need to be mentioned— the Shepherd,

the Clown, and Autolycus. Each of them has more lines than does Per­ dita, and among them they define the pastoral worldof the Bohemian seacoast. Like the major figures, they are characterized in terms of single traits having definite contributions to make to the devel­ opment of the central theme.

The Shepherd's simplicity functions to focus attention on the happy life of the countryside. In his first appearance he contrasts 147 sharply to Antigonus. Both are old; both grumble about the weather

(III.ill.), and both assume Perdita to be a bastard. Antigonus, though, leaves the child; the Shepherd picks her upi Antigonus dies; the

Shepherd grows wealthy. At the sheepshearing and even in the presence of kings and princes his pastoral simplicity remains his primary quality.

The Clown is silly and foolish. His pastoral clownishness complements the Shepherd’s simplicity in explaining how the pastoral life is happy. The pastoral world is above all a world of trust and simple faith. Robbed and cheated by Autolycus on three separate occasions, the Clown is never shown to complain or mention his losses. He remains just as credulous after three misencounters with

Autolycus as before the first. In fact, when he finds himself a

"gentleman born" he still remains unchanged. He is sho^m to be willing to swear, even though he knows better, that Autolycus is a "tall fellow" (V.ii.161). "If it be ne'er so false, a true gentleman may swear it in behalf of his friend" (V.il.154-5). He is a silly clown, but he knows that faith is the key to wisdom and happiness, even when faith must be exercised against the dictates of knowledge.

Autolycus is entirely a rogue. Like the Clown, he complements the

Shepherd's presentation of the pastoral worldiby revealing that country life is only so happy as the characters make it. Least happy of the pastoral figures, Autolycus has no faith and no trust. He can "sleep out the thought" of an afterlife, preferring what he knows to what others believe. He steals and cheats, but his efforts purchase him nothing but rags and stripes. He has much dialogue 148 about his knowledge, particularly as gained through his senses: "I understand the business, I hear it. To have an open ear, a quick eye, and a nimble hand is necessary for a cutpurse" (IV.iv.659-60). He laughs at "fool Honesty . . . and Trust" (IV.iv.589-90), yet at the end of the play he with his knowledge must sue to the silly, cred­ ulous fools he has so often:' cozened with his greater knowledge.

These three focus attention on the main theme by expressing in their own roles a minor re-enactment of the play's main thematic action. They do not differ materially from the Renaissance conventions for such stock figures; the established conventions are perfectly compatible with characterization in terms of single traits which focus attention on the central thematic issue.

The end result of the style of characterization found in The

Winter's Tale is to help achieve a Baroque unification of the play around the dominant theme of skeptical fideism. Characters develop in terms of single traits, and those traits are used to help focus attention upon the central thematic issue of the work. Rather than keeping rigidly to the dictates of decorum or expending energy in the creation of characters with "realistic" psychological and social characteristics, the play utilizes decorum and complexity only so far as they can aid in concentrating attention on the central thematic conflict. The result is characters who, like Hermione, verge on symbolism occasionally but who generally retain their value as per­ sonalities in at least a modified style of the Renaissance dramatic character. Usually, the characters are merely simplified and presented from a rigidly controlled point of view. Rather than allowing them 149 to expand in numerous directions and to take on traits specifically intended to give individual characters a meaning and value even in separation from the rest of the play, the playwright carefully limits the number of traits they can manifest in order tb'focas them on their thematic functions. Consequently, the characters seem rather flat and ill-done when taken from their context and compared with Renais­ sance figures from earlier works. The Baroque character, however, was never intended to have a value separate from his value within the play, and in his proper setting he compensates for his lack of complexity by achieving extreme intensity of expression and clarity of development for the central theme of the whole play and its theme. CONCLUSION

It would be pointless to hope that this study has been abso­ lutely convincing in its argument that The Winter's Tale is Baroque.

The concept of a literary Baroque is a much debated issue, and it would take a telling argument indeed to convince those many critics who think the very term fallacious that they should change their minds for the sake of this one play. Moreover, as I pointed out in my "Introduction," part of the controversy about the term centers upon the question of how it should be used; until scholars reach some sort of agreement upon this issue, all individual usages are subject to objection. And yet, I think my approach to The Winter's

Tale is a useful one; it has something to offer even to those who most violently object to calling literature, especially Shakespeare,

Baroque. In my interpretation of the work, I think I have not only hit upon some crucial qualities of the play itself (be those qualities

Baroque or not), but I have also pointed out some valuable issues for the general understanding of how Shakespeare's late romances differ from his earlier works.

In the first place, the theme of conflict between faith and knowledge is a matter which cannot be ignored when interpreting The

Winter's Tale. The two most crucial scenes of the play hinge upon the question of Leontes' choices between himself and Apollo (Ill.ii.)

150 151 and between accepting or rejecting Hermione (V.iii), In each case, the decision is basically a matter of choosing to believe or to know, since he finds himself in a position where the two are mutually exclusive alternatives. Although I think this kind of choice between faith and knowledge is a particularly seventeenth century quandary, one need not think it Baroque in order to recognize IJ/r 3. - its importance in the play's dramatic development. One certainly need not think that such a conflict is Baroque in order to see in it a developed and comic solution to the tragic problem of knowledge as Shakespeare presented it in Othello and Richard III.

Also, while I believe that the most accurate way of explaining the play's structure is to view it as a function of the Baroque urge for unified unity, I do not think that one must call it Baroque in order to recognize that structure in The Winter's Tale is pri­ marily a function of theme. The play has modified the protasis-epit- asis-catastrophe pattern of the earlier romantic comedies in some rather obvious ways, and I think it important to understand that all of those modifications serve to emphasize and clarify major thematic issues. A crucial distinction between the romantic comedies and the late romances, in other words, lies in the changed relationship between theme and structure. In the earlier works, structure is a pre-set framework within which themes can be worked out; in the late plays, structure is a flexible pattern which can be molded to fit the needs of pre-determined ideas.

On the matter of characterization I think it significant that

the play's major characters have much in common with the carefully 152 flattened figures in Ford's and Shirley's drama, but one need not think of Leontes and Hermione as Baroque in order to understand the deliberate manner in which the playwright focuses their development tightly on a limited set of traits. Here again, the contrast to the pattern in the earlier plays, where characterization stresses the variety of traits in a given character, seems useful for understanding the stylistic change in the romances, whether these late plays be called Baroque or not.

Finally, I think this study offers a new and useful understanding of the play's total aesthetic function and effect. It views The '

Winter's Tale as neither deliberately loose-structured, as S, L.

Bethell would have it, nor accidentally ill-made, as Quiller-Couch '' thinks it, but rather as a carefully developed, tightly designed work which moves constantly and consistently toward its goal.^ The play does not, as Neville Coghill suggests, indulge in gratuitous dramatics but uses sensational effects to stress thematically sig- 2 nificant moments. It does not, as Northrop Frye would like to suppose, move in some strange domain of pure art and pure creation; it moves logically and perspicuously toward a single thematic state- 3 ment. And it does not, as G. Wilson Knight and Derek Traversi believe, operate in some vastly mythological realm of mystico-poetic insight

^Bethell, The Winter's Tale; Quiller-Couch, Shakespeare's Workmanship. 2 Neville Coghill, "Six Points of Stage Craft in The Winter's Tale." ShS, 11 (1958), 31-41.

^Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective; The Development of Shake­ spearean Comedy and Romance (New York; Columbia U. Press, 1965T. 153 but rather deals with Issues topical and current at the time of its writing and expresses them in a theatrical style both popular and 4 effective.

The play is, in fact, what I can only call Baroque. The skep­ tical fideism which is the dominant thematic issue clearly connects with some of the central intellectual issues throughout the seven­ teenth century. The willingness to adapt the structural principles defined by the Renaissance to the particular demands of an individual theme is typical of the practice of much seventeenth century writing.

And the play's basic similarities to the dramatic technique of

England's most obviously Baroque dramatists— Fletcher, Ford, Shirley— places it at the source of the dominant Jacobean-Caroline tradition.

It is quite possible, of course, to disagree with calling these qualities Baroque, but it is not possible to doubt that The Winter's

Tale seems a clearer and more comprehensible play as a result of its being viewed within a seventeenth-century. Baroque context.

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